ive been playing a phone/tablet game called “The Tower” itsa a semi-idle roguelike defense game… that’s supremely grindy … I’m middling in it because I’m not into the algebra-like computations it takes to optimize coin collection and such but when you do get it going and go through a 500-level run for the first time
here’s an ad and trailer for it
Just recently started Rule the Waves 3, which has been described as a “spreadsheet game,” a genre with which I am unfamiliar. Basically you pick a country and, starting between 1890 and 1930, run their navy in its entirety. Peace and war, investment and spending, ship design and stationing among the world’s oceans and your possessions, research and technology development, aircraft and zeppelins, assigning and dismissing officers, responding to interfence and suggestions from your country’s government, managing crises and events, repairing, refitting, mothballing and scrapping ships, popular unrest, and so on.
And in between turns, if you are at war, an automated battle generator will create somewhat random encounters where you see your ships fight it out on a map and have (depending on difficulty setting) limited control over them. As the grand old secretary of the navy, your influence is necessarily big-picture, and since the enemies are AI, you have to deal with encounters that arise organically (you can’t force the battle generator to let your best ships jump the enemy’s worst ships, for example, or plan to hit them in ways the AI can’t respond.)
But you can cross their T, maneuver your ships, and so on.
There are almost NO graphics. Ships are little more than dots that can be enlarged to show a static deck plan, and sound is just the occasional thunder of the guns. The game LOOKS primitive in the extreme.
But the level of detail is astounding. Your senior officers have ability ratings from incompetent to brilliant, but they also have random traits like Sporting Enthusiast and Music Lover, and these sometimes actually come up in world events (like a sports team wins and the navy gets prestige). The officers even have affairs or get drunk, which can cause you to face difficult choices.
There are mines and airships and submarines and you can outfit ships for colonial service (extra marines and supplies), more or less reliable engines, torpedoes, AAA, eventually radar and missiles and helicopters.
There’s endless resource management decisions and long-term planning, but the payoff comes when your battlecruisers land their initial long-range salvos on the lone dreadnought of the arrogant French, disabling her long enough to pour on the shells and neutralize her deadly return fire. Or your destroyers intercept an enemy convoy guarded by a superior cruiser force, but manage to outrun the cruisers, circle the convoy, and make a high-speed pass through the helpless merchantmen, dispensing torpedoes and 5-inch shells right and left before escaping into the gathering twilight.
A major feature of the game is fog of war. You receive incomplete and erroneous contact reports and damage assessments all the time, and only afterward discover that cruiser looming out of the darkness was only a destroyer, or that your airships’ reported 5 bomb hits on an enemy dreadnought were a big fat nothingburger.
It’s certainly not for everybody, but I find it holding my interest bordering on obsession.
I’m sure no one cares, but I spent all day making all of these Super Mega Baseball 4 parody MLB team logos and I just had to share it with someone.
Not pictured are the Detroit Tiger Sharks, which like the real Detroit Tigers logo is just an old English “D,” and the Miami Manatees, which I haven’t come up with anything good for, so it’s just an “M” (you’re limited to the in-game assets).
I’ve always been a big fan of the Chicago Lubs.
I can second this one. It’s a lot of fun, and more interesting than what I expected based on just the premise of fishing and running a sushi restaurant.
I gave up on DDO after reaching the point where I quit the first time. Around level 9 the number of (free to play) level-appropriate solo dungeons starts to taper off and the ones that remain are less fun for me (e.g. I have to run around finding 50 pieces to an artifact on a confusing map, or I’m fighting monsters that are annoying to fight).
Pretty sure DDO gave away most of the older packs a few months back.
Really? Cause I tried to go to the Isle of Dread (say) and it sent me to the DDO store. Or do they have stuff in the store with a price of 0?
For whatever bizarre reason, they did the giveaway as a limited time sale. I think it was in April, but on the plus side, I think it was the second time they offered it. As I recall it was a month-long sale, so maybe just check in once a month to see what sales are going.
That’s something different. I’ve never heard of it, so it’s definitely not old. Googling around, it appears to be an expansion from 2022. Meaning it will never be part of those “all the old adventure packs are free!” sales. Both because it’s new, and because it’s an expansion, not an adventure pack. Expansions are (generally speaking) money purchases you buy in the “DDO Market”, as opposed to adventure packs you buy in the “DDO Store”, which can be bought with in-game currency that you earn from playing.
I was mainly responding to this bit:
This is quite an understatement, by the way. I believe there was only one single level nine free to play quest, and then maybe only a half a dozen more from levels 10 to 13. Then maybe one at 15, plus a three-quest line at 17, and I think that’s it.
The free giveaway on the old adventure packs, assuming it happens again, would be for adventure packs released before the first expansion: Menace of the Underdark. There’s tons and tons of content from level 3 to 20 in those old original adventure packs. Off the top of my head, vault of night, red fens, and demon sands (sands of menachtarun) offers a tremendous amount of content from 8 to 11. Then Gianthold has a ton from 13 to 14, with Vale of Twilight covering 16 to 17. Something like eight quests per level, and that’s just five different adventure packs, albeit four of them are the largest adventure packs. The giveaway was something like twenty or more adventure packs, including the five I mentioned.
I’ll try to keep my eye out for the next giveaway. There is so much content that you can’t even run each quest once before getting XP capped and being forced to level. Definitely no repeats required, at least until the next life when you do it all again.
Holy shit, I just found the giveaway details on ddowiki. It’s 47 adventure packs!
Against the Slave Lords*
Attack on Stormreach
Delera’s Tomb
Devil Assault
Disciples of Rage*
Dragonblood Prophecy*
Harbinger of Madness
Haunted Halls of Eveningstar*
Heart of Madness
Hunter and Hunted*
Keep on the Borderlands*
Peril of the Planar Eyes*
Phiarlan Carnival
Reign of Madness
Secrets of the Artificers
Sentinels of Stormreach
Shadow Under Thunderholme*
Shan-to-Kor
Sorrowdusk Isle
Tangleroot Gorge
The Catacombs
The Demon Sands
The Devil’s Gambit*
The Devils of Shavarath
The Dreaming Dark
The Druid’s Deep*
The High Road of Shadows*
The Lost Gatekeepers*
The Mines of Tethyamar*
The Necropolis, Part 1
The Necropolis, Part 2
The Necropolis, Part 3
The Necropolis, Part 4
The Path of Inspiration
The Reaver’s Reach
The Red Fens
The Restless Isles
The Ruins of Gianthold
The Ruins of Threnal
The Sharn Syndicate
The Soul Splitter*
The Temple of Elemental Evil*
The Vale of Twilight
The Vault of Night
Three-Barrel Cove
Trials of the Archons*
White Plume Mountain and Other Tales*
And not all of these are from before menace of the underdark. I put an asterisk on anything that came after. Note that anything that came after menace of the underdark will be significantly more difficult to run because newer content was tuned to more powerful characters than the older content.
Following the link from ddowiki to the original announcement, this giveaway was active from March 23rd to April 23rd. And I saw messages on Reddit talking about this same giveaway in April of 2022, so that’s two Aprils in a row. I guess make it a point to check next March/April?
ive been playing a phone/tablet game called “The Tower” it’s a semi-idle roguelike defense game… that’s supremely grindy … I’m middling in it because I’m not into the algebra-like computations it takes to optimize coin collection and such but when you do get it going and go through a 500-level run for the first time feels awesome
all you do is just upgrade things with the in-game currencies
here’s an ad and trailer for it
Awesome, super fun. I love that there are no graphics, keeping my phone nice and cool.
First two tries I got killed by the boss on wave 10, as is probably expected, and then the third try I got killed by the boss on wave 20. Again, probably expected. I’m digging it.
oh, believe me you’ve just started …Now there are discussions on Reddit and full-on guides on Discord that tell you whats good and whats a waste of time how to do specific builds … … funny thing is tho when I started it almost had none of the QOL improvements it has now
Do yourself a favor …don’t fall for the trap of going to the next tier the minute you get to 100 on tier one …
Finished Defense Zone 3, at least the first 13 missions. Beyond 13 it’s all about active abilities not related to towers, and you can pay money to get more of those active abilities, so that feels too much like pay to win to me.
After coming up with “perfect” designs for each I recorded my runs to youtube, as per my usual MO. Just finished rewatching them all and found it quite satisfying. If anyone is interested in checking them out, here is a link to the youtube playlist of all 13.
The most elegant run is probably either Mission 4 or Mission 6, both relatively short (~20 minutes), with the most chaotic probably being Mission 7, still reasonably short at 29 minutes. That one has so many enemies coming from so many directions that you have to build a bajillion towers, and quickly. I managed to squeeze in 21 max-level howitzers to handle the bloated hp-bags that always show up in the later levels.
In other news, the recent discussion of Control led me to check the steam page, and saw that the ultimate edition with both DLCs was on sale for $8. (Sale just ended; I barely nabbed just before it expired.) I originally got just the base game free from epic, so I’ve never seen the DLCs. $8 seemed a reasonable buy to me.
Installed it yesterday, and steam says I now have 98 minutes logged. So far so awesome. I’d forgotten how much I really like this game. I find killing stuff with the pistol immensely satisfying. Can’t wait to unlock the character upgrades; I must destroy stuff with LAUNCH!
So far I’m stuck on level 40. Gotten there a handful of times, but only once have I survived long enough for the boss to enter range of my guns, and that one time I didn’t get a single shot on him before I died.
Typically when I hit level 40, my stats are:
Game Speed 2.0, Attack Range 35m
Damage 200, Attack Speed 3x
Crit 20% x3, Multishot 10% x4
Health 200, Heal 1/sec
Defense 5%, Absolute 20, Thorn 5%
Cards: Damage I, Atk Speed I, # Enemies I
I also have some cash and coin upgrades. For lab research I finished all the level ones, a bunch of level twos and the core level threes. Each run generates around 1400 coins after watching the commercial for the 1.5x multiplier.
Anything jump out at you as blatantly wrong?
Also, I’m assuming I can’t get level two cards until I jump to tier 2, right? I currently have 132 gems, saving for $200 to unlock a fourth card slot. I have seven cards I’m not using, but none of them seem all that interesting. I’d spend my gems on new cards if I could get a Damage II card right now, but I’m stuck with I cards while I’m on tier 1, yes?
Nevermind, I ran across a tip on YouTube that may have kind of spoiled the fun for me. I had been playing as above and slowly progressing, getting to wave 57 multiple times but then getting swarmed and killed when I could no longer one-shot the weakest enemies.
I saw someone say all you have to do is upgrade defense, absolute defense and thorn and nothing else. I rolled my eyes but thought I might as well give it a shot. First try got me to wave 102, though I had been taking minor damage for the last few dozen levels, meaning my absolute defense was just barely keeping ahead of the incoming damage.
That 102 run gave me like 10K coins, which I dumped completely into defense, absolute defense, and thorn. Tried it again to see if that would make a difference…got to 170. I even earned an achievement for taking no damage for 100 consecutive levels. Around half a dozen times I would skip a round of upgrades and put that money instead into cash and coin generation, figuring the additional cash would let me get even further, which it appeared to do.
Around level 169 I got bored – it took well over an hour – so I started dumping cash into offensive abilities. Each defensive upgrade cost 3K each at that point, so I just started taking the offensive abilities up to 1K per upgrade. I got two of them up there but then boom, I was dead. Guess my absolute defense was just barely ahead of the incoming damage at that point. Earned like 15K coins from that run.
But now it’s much less interesting to me. I bet a dollar I can easily hit level 200 doing the same strategy next time, but do I want to sit there for over an hour doing that? It was much more fun going with a balanced approach.
I also took a look on Reddit, and everyone there is talking about millions, billions, and one dude even posted a screenshot showing a trillion coins in a single run. Terms were thrown around like “I can start the game and leave it running for 10 hours without taking any damage.” Uh…what? I thought that was hyperbole but now after these two 100+ runs, I think he meant that literally.
thought i sent this out when you asked …
for strategy guides go to their discord channel …there’s a button that takes you there in the options … also there’s really useful discussions Reddit once you figure out what all the terms and such mean…
but yeah they have specific builds for various goals… you’re still in the easy parts; ta lot of that strategy you seen wont go anywhere after the second tier
the thing is even though you gain raise the game speed via the lab it wont go over 5.0 it can go up to 6.5 via an in game perk but anything faster than that screws up the game to the point they slowed it down right before I started it back in feb
neant to say you can raise the game speed
Hello. I would like to introduce you to this lovely little game called Touhou LostWord that I’ve been playing for close to a year. It’s an officially licensed game…not a fangame, not a bootleg…based on the now very massive danmaku series Touhou. There’s way too much to put in one little post, of course, but here’s a good place to start. Basically it’s a land ruled by various tremendously beautiful and powerful female beings, the majority of them based on the yokai of Japanese folklore. (This’ll help! 
)
So what happens in LostWord? Well…fighting. That’s pretty much it. (There’s a side games area, but there’s only one game in it so far, and it’s been like that for months.) There are a variety of upgrades, boosts, equippable items, etc. to make your battle dames (known as “Friends”) more effective, and during downtime you can restore their condition, send them out on money- and item-earning tasks, and teach them skills. As with numerous games of its ilk, success begets success: the Friends conquer earlier challenges, gain the experience and items to grow stronger, conquer greater challenges, and so on.
So what’s so fantastic about it? Simple. You can play any stage you want… easy, hard, common enemies, boss, it doesn’t matter… with whatever Friends you want. In other words, if you want to bring overwhelming firepower to ensure victory, carefully match strengths against weaknesses, or even trash a weak boss over and over to rack up wins, you can! At no point does the game ever force you to take on a “challenge” or play “honorably” or make things “fair” (which about 99.999% of the time in actual practice means making everything horribly difficult or frustrating). You take on the battles you’re willing to take on when you want, and not a bullet more. And you know what the best part is? All the super-challenging or painful tasks, including the Tower and Arena (the ones you see in videos a lot), are 100% optional. They were designed for the truly iron-willed glass-chewing blood and guts god slayers, so if you’re not an iron-willed glass-chewing blood and guts god slayer, you can give it a pass and it doesn’t hurt you at all! Well, you do miss out on a few ultra-rare items, but unless you were shooting the moon to begin with, you won’t miss them.
Goddesses… 
I didn’t think anyone dared make these kind of games anymore. No enforced crushing difficulty, no byzantine skill trees, no endlessly sprawling labyrinths, no pages and pages of information to keep track of, no hour-long boss battles. Just tons of beautiful ladies and quirky, lighthearted stories. (Did I also mention that it’s completely free to play with minimal intrusions? 
) Needless to say, this is now completely my jam, and I’m going to keep at it for as long as GoodSmile’s creative juices can keep it going. Which, given how big Gensokyo is now, could be quite a while.