@Malco you're right it was meant to read "replaces all subtypes with a single subtype"

@Malco I never thought of encouraging someone in the edit description to keep what they like and revert what they don't. It would probably avoid the handful of times I made some good edits with a couple of questionable changes of wording, only to have the entire thing rolled back. Good idea!

Hey @Rainbolt, how's things going with the D&D game at your shop? Have you found a final player for it?

I haven't been looking. So tied up with PUBG and Minecraft at the moment that I forgot

@Rainbolt I wouldn't normally make an edit like I had done on that answer, but we had been going back and forth in comments and chat so I decided to ask first and goto town. Most of the stuff I changed was just formatting and style stuff so it was personal preference on whether to keep it

But ya, adding that little comment makes the edit a bit less adversarial and more like a suggestion

@Rainbolt In case you'd like, RPG General Chat has gotten into the habit of starring or pinning messages from chatizens seeking players for a game. (chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/11/rpg-general-chat)

@doppelgreener July?

@Rainbolt ... I was very sleep deprived that day. [edits]

Ah, I forgot you are a chat mod on every site lol

every site

Can you edit other people's messages?

@Rainbolt yes

I don't recognize that but let me guess

Steven Universe?

rick & morty

good guess though, considering the gems.

Ah, yea I just did a reverse image search and found it lol

That is Beth right?

I still need to watch the latest season.... just haven't gotten around to it. too much PUBG, and Minecraft and all that jazz

oh and Deadcells which is pretty good too

Haha

@Rainbolt What Minecraft have you been playing? I just started Skyfactory 2

@Malco yup

@Malco Direwolf20 1.12

Really missing EnderIO

Really hating the revamped Tinker's Construct

(more specifically, beth represented as an omnipotent goddess)

Loving Astral Sorcery though

I am looking forward to doing EnderIO along with AE2 in my pack, but it is skyblock so I might be a while out

Luckily I got a Molten Aluminum Cow as a random spawn so a bit of the starting work is a bit easier and less grindy

What did they change in Tinker's?

The overall power level of all weapons went way down (no more one shotting the Ender Dragon with that bow you just poured 500 quartz into)

My best bow took maybe 10 shots to kill the Wither

No more free auto repair from ball of moss

The auto repair sucks up your xp and uses it to repair the item

ahh that is too bad, Tinker has always been pretty powerful though

Hey... would either of you know a good longterm server for people who love building stuff? A friend of mine has been searching for a place and they are pretty skilled at building pretty things, but they (I think) feel like a bit of a leaf in the wind in terms of finding a server they're happy with. They have one they can use that has other players, but they're not totally happy with it and just there because it's the only one they know of that has population.

@doppelgreener Sorry I'm not really a part of any communities. Whenever I have played Minecraft it has only been Singleplayer or on a Server I setup on a spare machine for myself and a few friends

I don't ever play on public servers, and the servers I host all last for about two months and then disappear forever

Gotcha, OK.

But when I do host them they are stable. This one hasn't gone down for a week.

@Rainbolt that's more or less been their experience

The stability is more a testament to the progress Sun, Mojang, and the mod team than it is to my hosting ability. Previous packs had memory leaks that would inevitably crash the server.

Including Skyfactory 2 btw

Anything 1.7 will eventually crash

Luckily the Skyfactory I am running is single player so it dosen't stay open too long at a time

Though that reminds me I need to finish my Vivecraft server

Oh, you have Big Reactors too

I miss that one

Oh ya definitely going to need that for the automation I have planned

When you do Big reactors do you do the simple ones, or go and make all the steam turbines and such

and is converting cyanite to blutonium worth it?

I make a medium sized simple one, and then make turbines

The biggest turbine

hahaha sounds like a plan, I will probably give that a go once I have a good sieve system set up

We also don't have Thaumcraft. Man, I really miss 1.7 :(

Did the mod makers just not update their mods yet? or did the pack maker just not include it for some reason (didn't like or doesn't play nice with others)? Thaumcraft has been around for ages

It's a mixture of both, but primarily the former (not updated yet)

@Rainbolt Oh. That kind of disappearing!? Ouch. I was more thinking about activity drifting away.

Oh I meant disappear as in I get bored and turn it off. But yes, earlier versions "disappeared" once every few hours, but there was a server tool I had that would reboot them.

Mods could reboot with a command in game, if the server got laggy enough

oof

I tried using CreeperHost once when my older pc couldn't handle the number of players we had. Would not recommend them. The customer support is absolutely terrible.

yeah i am not entirely impressed with minecraft from an engineering side. (or a gameplay side, really. or a creative vision side. or...)

Minecraft is the best crappy game...

You might like the Twilight Forest mod. It's basically a really bad RPG. And you have to play it before you get OP gear from other mods, or else it's just tedious and not fun.

If you're a programmer, you can program turtles to mine for you

*Disclaimer: They are not actual turtles

Oh right. Perfectly square computers that hold a pickaxe (despite having no hands)

it would be cool if they were actual turtles though.....

@Rainbolt I've played in that one and it is nice.

@DukeZhou it's going to be a bit rougher with the exams, but I've had the idea of de-focusing the planner a bit.. I don't think it quite fits thematically, and I've found a way to make it be more straight-forward

as it is, with the 2D arrangement, it's a bit of an involved system that takes more than it gives in a game that isn't about it

so I'm thinking of splitting it into two kinds of action points

basically, major and minor AP

the major AP are the typical "number of actions you can do" AP you find in games, and the are certainly required in order to initiate an action, like an attack, production, etc

minor AP are used to fine-tune costs

let's say moving a squad takes 1 AP, fair enough, but difficult terrain or something might increase the aP/minor action point cost

I'm doing this for a reason: I want a resource that can be assigned to difficulty and semi-hoarded for big plays that doesn't have the power to let a lot of small actions happen

I want actions to be big, and to matter, attacks especially

I hate the 1dmg,1dmg,1dmg,1dmg shin-whacking that some games have

you spend 1 AP to initiate an attack, then you expend other resources to make it bigger. You don't attack four times. You attack once and devastatingly, and hopefully leave yourself vulnerable in the process. I want attacks to be more few and far between than in other games. Not too much, but certainly not once per turn

I want minor aP to be a little resource management decision, and major AP to be a tense decision between "doing this or that"

why not make all decisions like the major AP?

because I want to have a limited amount of big things you can do each turn, not a choice between that and many small ones

you have for example 2 major AP, you decide to attack something and build something, that's already probably a tense decision since there's a lot else you could be doing, and the 5-6 minor AP can be used to customise those actions

it's more granular... let's say attacking or casting something is 1 AP plus some intensity or bonus effects... you commit to casting it

if all AP were the same, you could get roughly the same effect by attacking 5 times, which is annoying to resolve and could be imbalanced, e.g. attacking with the same unit 5 times

so a unit may be able to attack more than once per turn right now? Say if they spent their points poperly

I suppose, I mean I want to kind of simplify and abstract out actions

you don't have an attack or a spell or something as much as you have "a unit action"

there's nothing special about an attack as opposed to casting a spell to clear out some fog or blinking to another area, or reorganising a squad

each unit has several things you can do, but most of them cost major AP

@AlexMitan I like the idea of splitting the AP up. At first I was like "uh, oh. Added complexity", but on reflection, it's pretty simple" Your motive, after all, is simplification.

Assuming the minor AP can be conserved, to be used in defense against a counter-attack, and not just to boost an assault?

basically, the thing about the cubes before was that you could only spend cubes from the 0-line

there was something special about that first push of the cube

("Push your luck" is very popular, so it would be nice to see the opposite also manifestable)

"Hedging your bets" to supplement "Push you luck"

you could have a planner that's 10 levels tall... with 3 cubes you could essentially spend 30 AP in one turn. Gigantic as it is, you can still only do THREE THINGS

there was something really special about pushing a cube from 0-1 and not from 3-4

and major AP are only worth 1 AP anyway, like the minor ones

if you really want to grind everything down and spend 8 AP on a spell, go for it, but that's all you're doing this turn, in a strategy game

the other person could be building three things

Do the minor AP (what do we call these) have to be on the planner?

Could the players just have a little pile of them, to draw on as they see fit?

I think the planner goes, maybe I didn't express myself well

you have two resources, two piles

major AP in one pile, minor AP in another

but without the planner, are you losing the time/benefit aspect?

I suppose, I'm going to have to recreate that in some way... maybe you don't start regenerating major AP until the minor ones are at capacity

or you have to decide what to really regenerate

that could be interesting

you need an abbreviation for minor AP

here's the thing... I was fiddling with the cubes on paper, and I stumbled upon one big problem

MP for minor points, AP for action points, because that's really what's going on

I was fiddling with the cubes, and "moving it all down" basically meant you had as much income as cubes, which was tying up two variables that shouldn't coincide

how many cubes you have is essentially how many actions you can take, and how much you move things down is your regeneration rate

you can have 6 cubes, and a regen rate of 1, or 2 cubes and a regen rate of 3

those are two very different playstyles

six actions that can be burst together, with a low income, or only two actions per turn that quickly replenish

so clearly you have this 2D layout of cubes, already quite a bit to wrap your head around, but then there's an arbitrary amount of income

how DO you move cubes downwards? if it's "any cubes moved down however many times up to income", then it's essentially a linear, overly complicated pile of resources

any other rules add complexity: "you can only move the topmost/bottom-most cubes one step, up to income"

they'd make a strong point about time management I suppose, but that's already enough of a minigame that you might forget about the actual wasteland and resources and artefacts and soldiers down there

I need it to be simpler, that's too much complexity

Speaking as a designer of one of the most compact games in history, with only about ~5 rules, but a "perceived complexity" problem, I can attest this is a very big concern

I can see a game with that sort of planner and system, but frankly it'd have to be the whole game

maybe like a trading or expeditions or something game all about resource management and timing

but, by the same token, what is your audience? is most widely played the objective, or the game that you would most want to play?

obviously it's good to strike a balance

"one complicated minigame just in the income phase" to add a touch of time management to what's basically board-game starcraft.. not worth it, as much as I like the element

I love extremely complex games, but in my experience, I'm in the minority

for now, definitely game I would enjoy playing that I could get light gamers gradually into

is that what a "gateway game" is?

like Carcassonne that someone like my girlfriend went from "intimidated by" to "a force of nature at"?

but even if something is exceptionally simple, players may still perceive it as complex (mathematicians paralyzed by [M], while middle-schoolers are undaunted;)

i <3 Carcassonne!

I want "non-Warhammer players" to approach the game with an interested, "try not to freak out" attitude, then relatively quickly get to the point where they do a thing that makes them go "Hah! Just as planned!"

Going "gateway" might be a great first step!

Me too, I really should play more

easier to produce, easier to play

then, you can do a subsequent game, that builds on the fundamentals you've introduced

And I want to experiment with information distribution... each player just having a few unit cards to inform what their units do, instead of unit info on the board like at first

we're planning on the same strategy

in fact, if there's no numbers and letters on the board, it's closer to what I have in mind than, let's say, a MtG table

hah, yeah, I see it

Q: are the unit cards like rules references?

I want to get some elements going, and recombine them into other games with other ideas.. I want to make some strong cores essentially

all about the core!

(or "the base";)

haah

someone needs to do a math geek version of that song...

I'm going to want to have buildings, but this'll allow me to treat them like units

I need to go eat, but yeah, you get the gist

I gotta grab food too.

and if I can find an elegant way to make everything either have 1HP, or look like it, then I consider it an advantage

I mean fundamentally, having multiple HIT POINTS means you need something to be hit multiple times, right

it may not be something I want in my game, since as I said, I don't want shin-whacking

ps LOVE "Chaos Manipulator"! (I'm trying to formalize the term "Chaos Function" fundamentalcombinatronics.com/chaos-functions

I don't want a zerg army to attack a command center 300 times before it's down, but I do want it to be able to attack a command center to death, to give a Starcraft example

using this symbol ❋ as a reference to Moorcock

so in fact, I want important things' protection to be more of a tactical than a numerical thing

if you care about your specialists and buildings so much, take care of them, don't just expect them to "take 5 attacks to kill"

lore-wise, there's stray bullets, saboteurs, horrible environmental conditions, half the people have some kind of magical potential

I like how the strategy goes into planning the attack, which is then executed quickly

essentially, anything can kill anything

way better than repetitive rolling

you want to kill a base? strategic planning is required

my big issue with RTS's is the maps are so tiny

ideally, distances are so great in the RTS that you can really spend time optimizing your base, b/c it takes real time to reach an opponent

one day....

I get bogged down in the aesthetics of RTS base building, which is a severe impediment re: PvP

so maybe it's more of an investment of resources thing than a "can they do it" thing

it's all theory now

but I'd rather mess with permissions

brb

I get why a single gunman can take down an entire city given enough time, but it's not something my game has to feature

me too

brb : ))

I just realized that the Magic Judge person on Tumblr answers some questions in private messages, and I have about a dozen answers from her in my inbox that I never saw

@murgatroid99 i hate when that happens!

I'm back