Saturday, May 23, 2020
The B- minus (and easier) Soulless Horror GW2 strategy
Background: I've recently taken to raiding 1-2 times a week in GW2 as part of my goal of eventually acquiring a legendary for each gear slot. Something that's equal parts frustrating and puzzling is how GW2 players play: essentially, the wisdom of the internet (snow crows, meta battle) says "play a glass cannon, run as many dps as possible, and try not to die" This is terrible advice. Yes, it's true, higher DPS means faster clear times and potentially less time for a screw up. But 90% of the time, this requires really really really good technical timing from players. The GW2 community, as a whole, is terrible at replicating snow crows' results, especially when timing comes into play. I don't want to rag on them completely, their builds are good starting places, but the GW2 community needs to understand that they're making a lot of PVE content 100x harder than is necessary, because alot of them, whether they like it or not, are not as "l33t" as they believe they are, and if they can't replicate "l33t" players in a given circumstance, they're really just wiping more than they should.
Soulless horror strategy (modified from conventional wisdom):
3 healers: Note, it's best to have an alacrity renegade healer as one (this will make up for the chronos' changes below). I also highly recommend a tempest as another for condition cleansing, as this fight can get very condition damage (condi) heavy. This also makes your heal druid, if they're the pusher as well, have a much easier time as they can focus on push tormented dead off of the platform. This set up essentially makes your group much durable and your chrono tanks' lives much easier. What's normal is 2 healers, one is a pusher
Chronomancer (chrono) tanks don't continuum split (CS can easily kill you because of all the fatal mechanics, even if you cancel early) & run seize the moment -> Seize the moment will help make up for the fact that your chronos aren't using continuum split to double-well on your well boons. They should also take time warp for extra quickness. Basically just don't die and pay attention to wells. Obviously, spam your boon support abilities when off CD, but this makes things much easier as you can just focus on using your block ability and sword distort ability when there's an attack as you're tanking. As a chrono tank I also took well of eternity for extra condi cleansing and clutch healing.
Here is our DPS report:
https://dps.report/Jbns-20200523-042114_sh
If you actually do the math on our clear time & boss health, our group DPS was around ~95k. Good dps can pull 30-40K on their own. Given condition damage isn't properly recorded, we probably had 1 top tier DPS and the rest I would argue were average or even sub par. There is a boss timer, so you can't completely be lazy, but the community needs to understand what "good enough" in terms of DPS looks like and focus on survivability outside it. Snow crows and metabattle should try to advertise this as well. I believe our PVE could even get puggable on some level if they did that.
As a side note, what no one explained to me when I was chrono tank the first time was that standing in front of the boss when you don't have up taunt means you're taking more damage and can renew your stacks (making it so when you take agro again, you die), moving away from the front of the boss is crucial to staying alive.
Basically as long as your DPS and other players can interrupt the horror's fear, and correctly dodge mechanics, you should have no trouble with this boss. This boss (unlike harder ones like Largos twins) is not a DPS rush and if you take your time & make your life easy, it becomes a piece of cake when you have the right set up.
Also as a note on Meta-battle and snow crows builds: There are often runes and exotics with the same stat setups that you see on the site. It is not 100% necessary to have full ascended gear when raiding & there are often very close rune combinations that can be used instead of the ones on the site. Search for the most important stats that mimic the ones you see.
For chrono tank specifically, Maklains, even crafted exotics, are prohibitively expensive. Purchase giver's instead and run some Nomad's trinkets and/or back with some diviner's in the trinkets slot. This worked fine for me for both having the toughness, vitality, and boon duration needed. Also note that selectable stat exotics are earnable through strikes and visions of steel as well as ranked PVP. So even if you're not a crafter, you can get your armor that way. My chrono tank set up is Giver's: All armor & weapons, Maklain's from selectable stat exotic back from New Year's festival, crafted nomad's earrings and Diviner's neck & rings from my power boon support DPS build.
Saturday, May 4, 2019
Pagan Online: early access review/first impressions
Update: this post is old and the game has changed significantly since. I've been finding the game difficult to get back into, and I can definitively say it's not the same game I had been playing before. If this game is still as good as it was then, it becomes that way after a siginificant amount of play
To be very clear, I had no original intention of trying Pagan Online, but ended up being very glad I did, despite it being early access.
Why?
1) The gameplay. This is kind of big, so it's going to be divided up:
Characters. To summarize, I like the freedom of having a completely different playstyle available to me without all of the overhead of rerolling and/or farming for the new build you typically see in other aRPGs. I also like the depth each character has individually. Here's some more details. In Pagan Online, you're choosing between characters instead of a "build." Each character has a core mechanic, and then a set of abilities. Often there's explicit and implicit synergies between those abilities. So instead of "picking" a build, you're "learning" a character. To make up for the fact that playing one character could turn very repetitive, It's very easy to swap between characters: your lower level characters can wear gear crafted or found by your higher level ones as gear requirements are based on ACCOUNT level instead of character level. So you can hit the ground running as soon as you unlock a new character (they still get stronger as they level up, but they're still very playable with high level gear) Also, you can freely swap between characters at the main hub without logging out. So if you get bored, you just swap between your favorites. The fact that your inventory is shared makes this even easier. There's also another advantage to playing multiple characters: every time a character levels up, it contributes experience towards your account level and your account level increases experience gained by all heroes, so you're literally losing nothing when you swap between characters because it makes leveling your "main" easier.Also, as long as you have the mats for crafting and/or are collecting a few extra gear pieces, it's generally easy to gear up a new character: The only unique slot is the weapon slot. That doesn't mean that there aren't stats that are better for different characters. And most of the time you don't have an optimal build in the gear, but just being able to put really strong gear on a low level character off the bat makes it easy to switch between play styles.
Skills. In most ARPGs, you choose a "build" from a set of skills and you tend to spam certain "core" skills while using other skills as the situation demands it. In contrast in Pagan Online, your skills are fixed depending on your character and all of them are on a cooldown except your main attack. Also, monsters tend to have stronger mechanics as you progress through the game. So you're not really "spamming" anywhere near the amount you would in a traditional aRPG. You're playing against mechanics and trying to use your skills in a smart way. Here's an example: My main, Istok has a shield and it's my primary source of damage mitigation. I may want to kite and use another ability to Slow my attackers to keep them away when when my shield is on cooldown to avoid taking damage instead of just spamming my slow ability for extra damage while my shield is in use/off cooldown and spamming my auto attack after, depending on the monsters I'm fighting. Also, many characters have synergies between particular abilities, so you're balancing your character mechanics against cooldowns and the mechanics of the monsters you're fighting as well. Also, every character has a core mechanic that needs some learning. I find balancing my skills and class mechanics far more engaging than traditional aRPGs where I'm mostly spamming. The abilities themselves feel impactful enough that you don't feel underpowered despite the cooldowns. I understand though, that the bulk of people who like the aRPG genre are not used to this. I hope by explaining how the game works that they'll enjoy it more when they actually try it, instead of just canning it the moment it doesn't meet their expectations. I also hope that people who traditionally don't like aRPGs may notice that there's more to this game than they're used to and will be willing to try it out. It was really satisfying downing the boss that used to be Dagoba's champion: I had to time and land my skills really well to win. I died the first time i tried it because I was still learning my "main". That leads me into the next point:
Difficulty. Most games nowadays are not actually "hard." Generally they start out easy and 90% of the time when things get "hard" it's due to a "hard" counter or "medium" counter that requires you to integrate something "gimmicky" into your build like a resistance skill, or just another skill the monster in question isn't immune to. This keeps the gameplay pretty "flat" as in it hasn't actually gotten harder and is outright frustrating if you didn't put the right mitigation to the counter in your build. In contrast in Pagan Online, I find myself playing against the mechanics that the monsters have. There are some monsters that are very punishing to be close to while they use their special ability, this means if I'm playing a melee character, I need to be very conscious of when they use that ability and which abilites I don't have on cooldown to counter. It may mean that I wait a bit before using a cooldown and I use a different ability instead. The mechanics seem well thought out and I've died enough that the game is challenging, but not so much that it feels tedious/impossible.
Format. Every mission is instanced. This makes pacing my gameplay easier so I don't end up spending too much time on it. While in a mission, as you move through it, you are periodically trapped in rooms or areas and then monsters spawn. This makes combat more difficult and interesting than a lot of aRPGs where you can run really far away to be "safe" and start over again, because in Pagan online, I'm forced to deal with the problems I'm facing now in the moment.
Gear. There's definitely some random in the gear system. The nice part about it is you have some levers you can pull on the system. The most valuable pieces of gear come from crafting. Crafted gear has some guaranteed stats and some random. Once you craft something, you can "reroll" it during the process if you have extra crafting materials. This takes some of the edge off of the punishing RNG that's normally present in Arpgs: You can hand-pick some stats and reroll an item you know is going to be good/have higher stats at will as long as you have extra materials. That's way more forgiving than i'm used this. They probably made it this way so building multiple characters wouldn't be as difficult.
2) The art style. For the most part, I like the detail on the character models and casting animations. They were very well done, and far exceed my expectations. They are also very unique, making the game feel very fresh. Also characters have in-game earnable skins with a level of detail that you wouldn't see mixing and matching "transmogs" in other rpgs. Also, I know this may turn some people off, but there is no where near the amount of flying gore you see in other games of the same genre. It still has a dark feel you want to see in an aRPG, it's just not over the top.
I will say, however, that Anya is a *slight* turn off to me because I don't like hyper-sexualized females in video games in general, but the worst part of her is the selection screen when you pick your first hero and you never see that screen again. For some reason she's bending over at you. After that she doesn't seem anything near the jiggly bit women you would see in an Asian MMO (the worst offenders by far in the category). Afterwards, when you can pick a character, she still seems a little over the top but not that bad. I have not played her yet, I picked something else. I almost returned the game at the selection screen, but I'm glad I didn't.
3) The story is very charming and fresh. The lore of the game is very based in Slavic pre-Christian lore, making it very foreign and enjoyable for me to learn. I'm not super familiar with Slavic lore but am in general interested to hear the lore from a variety of peoples. Also, as you're fighting through the campaign there's a lot of books you can choose to interact with to get even more backstory. The developers did not pull punches trying to develop lore from a completely new game.
It's not all rainbows and sunshine though, the game still has some issues, that I hope the devs will work through:
1) It's not "online" yet: Multiplayer has yet to be implemented. They tried it but their servers couldn't take the load, so they're still working on it. You CAN see other players in the hub and there is a chat.
2) The guiding arrows screw up from time to time. Opening my map with "M" can usually help me know where exactly I should be going.
3) I've had some bosses on missions bug on me. It was really frustrating getting "stuck" because I couldn't kill a boss once. (the boss somehow moved out of the combat area
4) A quarter of the time when i log in, I get the error "cannot authenticate with steam" I've discovered this error seems both intermittent and constant depending on the root cause: If there's maintenance, it's constant. If there's not, generally logging in and out of steam fixes it faster than if I haven't. There are additional steps you can try, thankfully, I've never had to do a full re-install for this. It was really frustrating hitting this wall when i first installed. it did not leave a good impression. I failed to authenticate multiple times after the fresh install. I'm sure many people would have stopped and just asked for their money back.
5) The updates seem clunky. Even when there's a tiny update the update process takes a long time.
In summary I would say, if you're looking for a new aRPG, don't mind it being single player, can tolerate some bugs and the style sounds interesting, go ahead and try. If not, then wait for the game to fully release. As someone who works in tech, I can say that solutions to synchronization issues/efficient protocols can be tricky, so the devs have their work cut out for them, so I wouldn't recommend buying the game for a future guarantee of multiplayer because you don't know what their skill level is with those sorts of issues. I'm fairly certain there's solutions to them, but we'll learn the capabilities of these devs as we watch the early access move forward.I personally am enjoying this and have been off of guild wars 2 for a while in favor of it.
To be very clear, I had no original intention of trying Pagan Online, but ended up being very glad I did, despite it being early access.
Why?
1) The gameplay. This is kind of big, so it's going to be divided up:
Characters. To summarize, I like the freedom of having a completely different playstyle available to me without all of the overhead of rerolling and/or farming for the new build you typically see in other aRPGs. I also like the depth each character has individually. Here's some more details. In Pagan Online, you're choosing between characters instead of a "build." Each character has a core mechanic, and then a set of abilities. Often there's explicit and implicit synergies between those abilities. So instead of "picking" a build, you're "learning" a character. To make up for the fact that playing one character could turn very repetitive, It's very easy to swap between characters: your lower level characters can wear gear crafted or found by your higher level ones as gear requirements are based on ACCOUNT level instead of character level. So you can hit the ground running as soon as you unlock a new character (they still get stronger as they level up, but they're still very playable with high level gear) Also, you can freely swap between characters at the main hub without logging out. So if you get bored, you just swap between your favorites. The fact that your inventory is shared makes this even easier. There's also another advantage to playing multiple characters: every time a character levels up, it contributes experience towards your account level and your account level increases experience gained by all heroes, so you're literally losing nothing when you swap between characters because it makes leveling your "main" easier.Also, as long as you have the mats for crafting and/or are collecting a few extra gear pieces, it's generally easy to gear up a new character: The only unique slot is the weapon slot. That doesn't mean that there aren't stats that are better for different characters. And most of the time you don't have an optimal build in the gear, but just being able to put really strong gear on a low level character off the bat makes it easy to switch between play styles.
Skills. In most ARPGs, you choose a "build" from a set of skills and you tend to spam certain "core" skills while using other skills as the situation demands it. In contrast in Pagan Online, your skills are fixed depending on your character and all of them are on a cooldown except your main attack. Also, monsters tend to have stronger mechanics as you progress through the game. So you're not really "spamming" anywhere near the amount you would in a traditional aRPG. You're playing against mechanics and trying to use your skills in a smart way. Here's an example: My main, Istok has a shield and it's my primary source of damage mitigation. I may want to kite and use another ability to Slow my attackers to keep them away when when my shield is on cooldown to avoid taking damage instead of just spamming my slow ability for extra damage while my shield is in use/off cooldown and spamming my auto attack after, depending on the monsters I'm fighting. Also, many characters have synergies between particular abilities, so you're balancing your character mechanics against cooldowns and the mechanics of the monsters you're fighting as well. Also, every character has a core mechanic that needs some learning. I find balancing my skills and class mechanics far more engaging than traditional aRPGs where I'm mostly spamming. The abilities themselves feel impactful enough that you don't feel underpowered despite the cooldowns. I understand though, that the bulk of people who like the aRPG genre are not used to this. I hope by explaining how the game works that they'll enjoy it more when they actually try it, instead of just canning it the moment it doesn't meet their expectations. I also hope that people who traditionally don't like aRPGs may notice that there's more to this game than they're used to and will be willing to try it out. It was really satisfying downing the boss that used to be Dagoba's champion: I had to time and land my skills really well to win. I died the first time i tried it because I was still learning my "main". That leads me into the next point:
Difficulty. Most games nowadays are not actually "hard." Generally they start out easy and 90% of the time when things get "hard" it's due to a "hard" counter or "medium" counter that requires you to integrate something "gimmicky" into your build like a resistance skill, or just another skill the monster in question isn't immune to. This keeps the gameplay pretty "flat" as in it hasn't actually gotten harder and is outright frustrating if you didn't put the right mitigation to the counter in your build. In contrast in Pagan Online, I find myself playing against the mechanics that the monsters have. There are some monsters that are very punishing to be close to while they use their special ability, this means if I'm playing a melee character, I need to be very conscious of when they use that ability and which abilites I don't have on cooldown to counter. It may mean that I wait a bit before using a cooldown and I use a different ability instead. The mechanics seem well thought out and I've died enough that the game is challenging, but not so much that it feels tedious/impossible.
Format. Every mission is instanced. This makes pacing my gameplay easier so I don't end up spending too much time on it. While in a mission, as you move through it, you are periodically trapped in rooms or areas and then monsters spawn. This makes combat more difficult and interesting than a lot of aRPGs where you can run really far away to be "safe" and start over again, because in Pagan online, I'm forced to deal with the problems I'm facing now in the moment.
Gear. There's definitely some random in the gear system. The nice part about it is you have some levers you can pull on the system. The most valuable pieces of gear come from crafting. Crafted gear has some guaranteed stats and some random. Once you craft something, you can "reroll" it during the process if you have extra crafting materials. This takes some of the edge off of the punishing RNG that's normally present in Arpgs: You can hand-pick some stats and reroll an item you know is going to be good/have higher stats at will as long as you have extra materials. That's way more forgiving than i'm used this. They probably made it this way so building multiple characters wouldn't be as difficult.
2) The art style. For the most part, I like the detail on the character models and casting animations. They were very well done, and far exceed my expectations. They are also very unique, making the game feel very fresh. Also characters have in-game earnable skins with a level of detail that you wouldn't see mixing and matching "transmogs" in other rpgs. Also, I know this may turn some people off, but there is no where near the amount of flying gore you see in other games of the same genre. It still has a dark feel you want to see in an aRPG, it's just not over the top.
I will say, however, that Anya is a *slight* turn off to me because I don't like hyper-sexualized females in video games in general, but the worst part of her is the selection screen when you pick your first hero and you never see that screen again. For some reason she's bending over at you. After that she doesn't seem anything near the jiggly bit women you would see in an Asian MMO (the worst offenders by far in the category). Afterwards, when you can pick a character, she still seems a little over the top but not that bad. I have not played her yet, I picked something else. I almost returned the game at the selection screen, but I'm glad I didn't.
3) The story is very charming and fresh. The lore of the game is very based in Slavic pre-Christian lore, making it very foreign and enjoyable for me to learn. I'm not super familiar with Slavic lore but am in general interested to hear the lore from a variety of peoples. Also, as you're fighting through the campaign there's a lot of books you can choose to interact with to get even more backstory. The developers did not pull punches trying to develop lore from a completely new game.
It's not all rainbows and sunshine though, the game still has some issues, that I hope the devs will work through:
1) It's not "online" yet: Multiplayer has yet to be implemented. They tried it but their servers couldn't take the load, so they're still working on it. You CAN see other players in the hub and there is a chat.
2) The guiding arrows screw up from time to time. Opening my map with "M" can usually help me know where exactly I should be going.
3) I've had some bosses on missions bug on me. It was really frustrating getting "stuck" because I couldn't kill a boss once. (the boss somehow moved out of the combat area
4) A quarter of the time when i log in, I get the error "cannot authenticate with steam" I've discovered this error seems both intermittent and constant depending on the root cause: If there's maintenance, it's constant. If there's not, generally logging in and out of steam fixes it faster than if I haven't. There are additional steps you can try, thankfully, I've never had to do a full re-install for this. It was really frustrating hitting this wall when i first installed. it did not leave a good impression. I failed to authenticate multiple times after the fresh install. I'm sure many people would have stopped and just asked for their money back.
5) The updates seem clunky. Even when there's a tiny update the update process takes a long time.
In summary I would say, if you're looking for a new aRPG, don't mind it being single player, can tolerate some bugs and the style sounds interesting, go ahead and try. If not, then wait for the game to fully release. As someone who works in tech, I can say that solutions to synchronization issues/efficient protocols can be tricky, so the devs have their work cut out for them, so I wouldn't recommend buying the game for a future guarantee of multiplayer because you don't know what their skill level is with those sorts of issues. I'm fairly certain there's solutions to them, but we'll learn the capabilities of these devs as we watch the early access move forward.I personally am enjoying this and have been off of guild wars 2 for a while in favor of it.
Tuesday, April 9, 2019
Buyer Beware: Paid early access on steam
Paid early access games on steam are pretty predatory: the developer can literally pull the plug on their project and all the money you've invested on them is gone. This is actually quite common (or so I've read on steam forums), and steam doesn't let you return a game you've sunk more than 2 hours into. So basically the publisher and steam run off with the money you've paid and the publisher has no incentive to keep it going.
Thankfully, I didn't buy any of the more expensive founder's packs for the game I tested, but man I'm really feeling for the people who paid for the expensive ones. The game in question is Breach. It was basically supposed to be a dungeon crawler with match making where a player played as the villain (Veil Demon) and the other 4 players tried to beat the dungeon with the Veil Demon working against them.
Given what I've seen in paid early access on the games I've messed with, I wouldn't recommend touching it with a 10-ft pole: It really has only ever felt like an excuse to release an incomplete game, hoping to run off with the money users paid for it & shut it down. The developers never seem to listen to feedback & improve the game based on it. I've seen even these games listed in popular gaming news sites and some even come from reputable publishers. So really, nothing tells you whether or not these projects will succeed and I would say this: If you're willing to part with that money and expect it to literally mean nothing in 2-6 months, go ahead, buy into a paid early access game. But a real game, won't do that. They'll send out alpha and beta keys and do plenty of their own testing and feedback gathering before pushing a project. And if you think about it, this makes sense: You wouldn't just want anyone testing your game, first impressions mean a lot. You would want your game tested with lots of feedback under NDA so you can improve it without it leaking that it has huge issues, so when it IS ready for market, it has the "Wow!" factor that keeps gamers coming back for more.
Thankfully, I didn't buy any of the more expensive founder's packs for the game I tested, but man I'm really feeling for the people who paid for the expensive ones. The game in question is Breach. It was basically supposed to be a dungeon crawler with match making where a player played as the villain (Veil Demon) and the other 4 players tried to beat the dungeon with the Veil Demon working against them.
Given what I've seen in paid early access on the games I've messed with, I wouldn't recommend touching it with a 10-ft pole: It really has only ever felt like an excuse to release an incomplete game, hoping to run off with the money users paid for it & shut it down. The developers never seem to listen to feedback & improve the game based on it. I've seen even these games listed in popular gaming news sites and some even come from reputable publishers. So really, nothing tells you whether or not these projects will succeed and I would say this: If you're willing to part with that money and expect it to literally mean nothing in 2-6 months, go ahead, buy into a paid early access game. But a real game, won't do that. They'll send out alpha and beta keys and do plenty of their own testing and feedback gathering before pushing a project. And if you think about it, this makes sense: You wouldn't just want anyone testing your game, first impressions mean a lot. You would want your game tested with lots of feedback under NDA so you can improve it without it leaking that it has huge issues, so when it IS ready for market, it has the "Wow!" factor that keeps gamers coming back for more.
Tuesday, January 1, 2019
How to make your "afterlife" profitable: The rest of the internet is wrong. And it's hilarious.
TLDR: Hell's banks can be used like a 90s credit card scheme to finance everything.
If you nabbed "Afterlife" off of Good Old Games you may be wondering how to start out. It's very difficult to get out of the red before the 4 surfers of apocalypso come crashing on your door and literally destroy your paradise and/or perfect torture.
The wisdom of the internet says to only build heaven or hell (usually hell, which is actually even more wrong, I'll explain why later). This strategy only works on easy at best, the other game modes just don't have the cash to deal with the initial loss the player experiences as they're building their afterlives up. I found the solution. I will warn you though, it's a spoiler, because it's also a hilarious twist on this game's main point: mocking 90s pop culture and lifestyle.
So what is it? Well basically, the strategy is to use infinite cash to wait out the period where your afterlives are negative until you finally make them profitable. Infinite cash you say? From where? Turns out the banks in heaven and hell loan money markedly different: Heaven charges yearly interest, whereas hell DOESN'T. And if you don't pay the money off, the banks in hell nab souls from your afterlife (not sure if it's one or both heaven or hell, I'll do science and update later). BUT you can pay off the banks in hell early and prevent them from nabbing souls. You can also immediately pay off and then re-withdraw the amount you borrowed. See where I'm going here? The banks cost less to build than what they actually loan. So as long as you have enough cash to build a bank, you essentially can never go bankrupt: Just build enough banks to have enough cash to cover one loan. All you have to do is make sure you're holding enough cash for a single loan, and then cycle through all of your bank(s) in hell periodically paying off and re-withdrawing (I do like every 50 years). Why is this hilarious? The 90s were the heyday of credit card schemes. Balance transfer fees weren't really a thing then. So people would constantly cycle debt between multiple cards and sometimes even found ways to earn money in the process with various rewards. So it makes perfect sense that the creators, in an effort to mock 90s culture, would make it all but required to finance your afterlives this way. I was literally kicking myself after multiple failed attempts at a single afterlife on higher difficulties when I realized this. I could get the "just heaven or hell" strategy to work for "easy" difficulty but that was it. Given how badly you bleed cash at the beginning of this game, and how it's literally impossible to finance both afterlives simultaneously, even on the lowest difficulty, I'm 100% sure that this business model for the early game was intentional and the creators did their best to make you realize that by making you bleed so hard at the beginning of the game that you'd be desparate to look at your lending options. Like why wouldn't they want you building both? That's the point of the game. Unfortunately, I don't think the gaming community got the joke because the person who introduced me to this game told me that the game was nigh impossible. There's an advantage to building both afterlives simultaneously too: the total population of both is used to calculate the value of souls coming in. So in the long run, you're better off building both simultaneously if possible.
Profitability: As long as you can balance your vibes for heaven and hell and more souls are coming in, you will be profitable. The easiest way to control vibes is to build training centers interspersed throughout your afterlives. Be sure to turn them off often enough to be importing at least 10% of your workforce. Idle angels or demons will destroy the other afterlife. Also, in heaven, you want to mix the rewards as much as possible (group clusters that are unalike together). Hell does better with uniformity in its punishments.
Why is heaven better for the single afterlife strategy? Because souls more readily train to become angels than demons. Every time I've built both heaven and hell at the same time, heaven has broken even much faster because the number of angels that are self-trained goes up way faster than the number of self-trained demons in my hell. These "Natively" trained demons or angels are much cheaper than imported ones. There's a catch though: if you ever get idle natively trained demons or angels, they'll attack the opposing afterlife. For this reason, it's best to maintain at least a 10% imported workforce. As your afterlife becomes more populated, you can probably get away with even more imported angels/demons. That might be optimal because I don't know that the "Afterlife" arcology equivalent employs the same number of demons/angels as normal dwellings do in the end game.
EDIT: Looks like I found an outdated game FAQ dated from 1996 with this strategy explained, But it's just a detail amongst many others. I'm shocked it doesn't describe it in any sort of quick start guide :
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/196555-afterlife/faqs/2026
I also figured this out, all on my own.
If you nabbed "Afterlife" off of Good Old Games you may be wondering how to start out. It's very difficult to get out of the red before the 4 surfers of apocalypso come crashing on your door and literally destroy your paradise and/or perfect torture.
The wisdom of the internet says to only build heaven or hell (usually hell, which is actually even more wrong, I'll explain why later). This strategy only works on easy at best, the other game modes just don't have the cash to deal with the initial loss the player experiences as they're building their afterlives up. I found the solution. I will warn you though, it's a spoiler, because it's also a hilarious twist on this game's main point: mocking 90s pop culture and lifestyle.
So what is it? Well basically, the strategy is to use infinite cash to wait out the period where your afterlives are negative until you finally make them profitable. Infinite cash you say? From where? Turns out the banks in heaven and hell loan money markedly different: Heaven charges yearly interest, whereas hell DOESN'T. And if you don't pay the money off, the banks in hell nab souls from your afterlife (not sure if it's one or both heaven or hell, I'll do science and update later). BUT you can pay off the banks in hell early and prevent them from nabbing souls. You can also immediately pay off and then re-withdraw the amount you borrowed. See where I'm going here? The banks cost less to build than what they actually loan. So as long as you have enough cash to build a bank, you essentially can never go bankrupt: Just build enough banks to have enough cash to cover one loan. All you have to do is make sure you're holding enough cash for a single loan, and then cycle through all of your bank(s) in hell periodically paying off and re-withdrawing (I do like every 50 years). Why is this hilarious? The 90s were the heyday of credit card schemes. Balance transfer fees weren't really a thing then. So people would constantly cycle debt between multiple cards and sometimes even found ways to earn money in the process with various rewards. So it makes perfect sense that the creators, in an effort to mock 90s culture, would make it all but required to finance your afterlives this way. I was literally kicking myself after multiple failed attempts at a single afterlife on higher difficulties when I realized this. I could get the "just heaven or hell" strategy to work for "easy" difficulty but that was it. Given how badly you bleed cash at the beginning of this game, and how it's literally impossible to finance both afterlives simultaneously, even on the lowest difficulty, I'm 100% sure that this business model for the early game was intentional and the creators did their best to make you realize that by making you bleed so hard at the beginning of the game that you'd be desparate to look at your lending options. Like why wouldn't they want you building both? That's the point of the game. Unfortunately, I don't think the gaming community got the joke because the person who introduced me to this game told me that the game was nigh impossible. There's an advantage to building both afterlives simultaneously too: the total population of both is used to calculate the value of souls coming in. So in the long run, you're better off building both simultaneously if possible.
Profitability: As long as you can balance your vibes for heaven and hell and more souls are coming in, you will be profitable. The easiest way to control vibes is to build training centers interspersed throughout your afterlives. Be sure to turn them off often enough to be importing at least 10% of your workforce. Idle angels or demons will destroy the other afterlife. Also, in heaven, you want to mix the rewards as much as possible (group clusters that are unalike together). Hell does better with uniformity in its punishments.
Why is heaven better for the single afterlife strategy? Because souls more readily train to become angels than demons. Every time I've built both heaven and hell at the same time, heaven has broken even much faster because the number of angels that are self-trained goes up way faster than the number of self-trained demons in my hell. These "Natively" trained demons or angels are much cheaper than imported ones. There's a catch though: if you ever get idle natively trained demons or angels, they'll attack the opposing afterlife. For this reason, it's best to maintain at least a 10% imported workforce. As your afterlife becomes more populated, you can probably get away with even more imported angels/demons. That might be optimal because I don't know that the "Afterlife" arcology equivalent employs the same number of demons/angels as normal dwellings do in the end game.
EDIT: Looks like I found an outdated game FAQ dated from 1996 with this strategy explained, But it's just a detail amongst many others. I'm shocked it doesn't describe it in any sort of quick start guide :
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/196555-afterlife/faqs/2026
I also figured this out, all on my own.
Sunday, July 26, 2015
So life
I've been more or less inactive because I got married and started a job. Balancing that with my normal hobbies has left me little time for blogging.
Tuesday, August 5, 2014
How to completely unload a visa gift card into Rixty or to purchase Rift credits
How to purchase Rixty:
1) Activate your card
2) Go to the store and buy pre-loaded cards (Wal-mart, Kroger brand stores, 7-Eleven sell them). You can't buy Rixty online with a wells fargo visa gift card because the transaction comes from Ireland and out-of-US purchases are not allowed. BUT because the store is the one who pays Rixty for the cards, using your credit-card in store to buy rixty works because you're paying back the store. Confusing. But it works! I did it.
3) Cash them in on the Rixty site.
How to purchase Rift Credits
This is trickier because if you activate your card online, you can buy rift credits, but just not so much that it completely unloads the card. There is a way around this. You buy Rixty money as above and cash it in to buy credits.
I started off explaining the process it took me to learn all of this, but really, it's just a bunch of bureaucratic poo. In short, I did file a ticket with Trion to let them know about not being able to completely unload the card directly through them, and how crappy that was because I've been able to completely unload cards for Riot points.
1) Activate your card
2) Go to the store and buy pre-loaded cards (Wal-mart, Kroger brand stores, 7-Eleven sell them). You can't buy Rixty online with a wells fargo visa gift card because the transaction comes from Ireland and out-of-US purchases are not allowed. BUT because the store is the one who pays Rixty for the cards, using your credit-card in store to buy rixty works because you're paying back the store. Confusing. But it works! I did it.
3) Cash them in on the Rixty site.
How to purchase Rift Credits
This is trickier because if you activate your card online, you can buy rift credits, but just not so much that it completely unloads the card. There is a way around this. You buy Rixty money as above and cash it in to buy credits.
I started off explaining the process it took me to learn all of this, but really, it's just a bunch of bureaucratic poo. In short, I did file a ticket with Trion to let them know about not being able to completely unload the card directly through them, and how crappy that was because I've been able to completely unload cards for Riot points.
Friday, March 7, 2014
Sorry Random Brownie recipe
So sometimes I see a recipe and want to try it, but I'm afraid the link will break. Hopefully, one day I'll get to try these. The author said the brownies cook better when you take them out in the middle. I mean that's an easy trick to remember, but I've been dying to get my hands on a home made brownie recipe for a while now. My dad never gave me his (yes, you read that correctly, my DAD not my MOM. My mom can cook desserts, but it's the men that have the big guns when it comes to desserts in my family...)
FUDGY BROWNIE THINS WITH SEA SALT
Ingredients:
Ingredients:
- 6 ounces unsweetened chocolate (100 percent cacao), chopped
- 3 sticks (1 1/2 cups) unsalted butter, cut into pieces
- 3 cups sugar
- 6 large eggs
- 1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
- 1 teaspoon fine sea salt
- 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (any type, as long as it’s unsweetened)
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- Maldon sea salt, if desired
- EQUIPMENT: an 18- by 13-inch rimmed baking sheet (a.k.a. half-sheet pan)
Preparation:
FUDGY BROWNIE THINS WITH SEA SALT
Heat the oven to 325°F with the rack in the middle. Lightly grease or butter the pan and line it with parchment or foil.
Melt the chocolate with the butter in a large metal bowl set over a pan of simmering water, stirring occasionally, until smooth. Remove the bowl from the pan and whisk in the sugar.
Add the eggs, 1 at a time, whisking well after each addition, and whisk the mixture vigorously until it is smooth and cohesive. Whisk in the vanilla and salt. Sift the cocoa over the batter and stir with a whisk until it is incorporated and the batter is smooth. Sift the flour over the batter and stir with the whisk in the same manner until the batter is smooth.
Spread the batter evenly in the pan and, if desired, sprinkle the top lightly with flakes of Maldon sea salt. Bake 15 minutes.
Remove the pan from the oven and let the brownies rest 15 minutes at room temperature. Return the brownies to the oven and continue to bake them until a wooden pick comes out clean, 17 to 20 minutes.
Cool the brownies completely in the pan on a rack. Cut the brownies into serving pieces.
Melt the chocolate with the butter in a large metal bowl set over a pan of simmering water, stirring occasionally, until smooth. Remove the bowl from the pan and whisk in the sugar.
Add the eggs, 1 at a time, whisking well after each addition, and whisk the mixture vigorously until it is smooth and cohesive. Whisk in the vanilla and salt. Sift the cocoa over the batter and stir with a whisk until it is incorporated and the batter is smooth. Sift the flour over the batter and stir with the whisk in the same manner until the batter is smooth.
Spread the batter evenly in the pan and, if desired, sprinkle the top lightly with flakes of Maldon sea salt. Bake 15 minutes.
Remove the pan from the oven and let the brownies rest 15 minutes at room temperature. Return the brownies to the oven and continue to bake them until a wooden pick comes out clean, 17 to 20 minutes.
Cool the brownies completely in the pan on a rack. Cut the brownies into serving pieces.
Ingredients:
- 6 ounces unsweetened chocolate (100 percent cacao), chopped
- 3 sticks (1 1/2 cups) unsalted butter, cut into pieces
- 3 cups sugar
- 6 large eggs
- 1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
- 1 teaspoon fine sea salt
- 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (any type, as long as it’s unsweetened)
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- Maldon sea salt, if desired
- EQUIPMENT: an 18- by 13-inch rimmed baking sheet (a.k.a. half-sheet pan)
Preparation:
Heat the oven to 325°F with the rack in the middle. Lightly grease or butter the pan and line it with parchment or foil.
Melt the chocolate with the butter in a large metal bowl set over a pan of simmering water, stirring occasionally, until smooth. Remove the bowl from the pan and whisk in the sugar.
Add the eggs, 1 at a time, whisking well after each addition, and whisk the mixture vigorously until it is smooth and cohesive. Whisk in the vanilla and salt. Sift the cocoa over the batter and stir with a whisk until it is incorporated and the batter is smooth. Sift the flour over the batter and stir with the whisk in the same manner until the batter is smooth.
Spread the batter evenly in the pan and, if desired, sprinkle the top lightly with flakes of Maldon sea salt. Bake 15 minutes.
Remove the pan from the oven and let the brownies rest 15 minutes at room temperature. Return the brownies to the oven and continue to bake them until a wooden pick comes out clean, 17 to 20 minutes.
Cool the brownies completely in the pan on a rack. Cut the brownies into serving pieces.
Melt the chocolate with the butter in a large metal bowl set over a pan of simmering water, stirring occasionally, until smooth. Remove the bowl from the pan and whisk in the sugar.
Add the eggs, 1 at a time, whisking well after each addition, and whisk the mixture vigorously until it is smooth and cohesive. Whisk in the vanilla and salt. Sift the cocoa over the batter and stir with a whisk until it is incorporated and the batter is smooth. Sift the flour over the batter and stir with the whisk in the same manner until the batter is smooth.
Spread the batter evenly in the pan and, if desired, sprinkle the top lightly with flakes of Maldon sea salt. Bake 15 minutes.
Remove the pan from the oven and let the brownies rest 15 minutes at room temperature. Return the brownies to the oven and continue to bake them until a wooden pick comes out clean, 17 to 20 minutes.
Cool the brownies completely in the pan on a rack. Cut the brownies into serving pieces.
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