Weekly eXchange #194 – War? Totally.

Join Nate and Troy as they bring you all the important information on all of your favorite 4X and strategy games! This week they talk about Civilization 6, Aggressors: Ancient Rome, Driftland: The Magic Revival, Star Zeal 4X, Stellar Monarch, Stars Beyond Reach, Age of Wonders: Planetfall and much much more. As well as continued coverage for your other favorite 4X and strategy games!

Music for eXplorminate by Mangadrive

Show Notes:

Civilization 6 update – 01:55
Aggressors: Ancient Rome update and Aggressors Dev Diary #6 – Combat (part 1) – 05:45
Driftland update – 07:35
Star Zeal 4x update – 09:36
Stellar Monarch 1.25 is out – 10:58
Stars Beyond Reach update – 13:01
- AI War 2 Steam page
Age of Wonders: Planetfall update – 14:42
Northgard update – 18:50
Total War: Rome 2 update – 23:43
Total War update – 24:42
What is Panzercorps 2? – 28:18
What is Circle Empires? – 32:33
Star Control mumbo-jumbo… and a GoFundMe – 34:32
- Star Control: Origins Steam page

Games played – 40:17

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14 Comments

GermanDad 8 years ago

thanks for the show.
@redshell….doesn’t matter what the product does, i just want to have the option to not be part of it. so developers who don’t inform about using it just are behaving bad to their customers. that i can’t accept and don’t like.

blacksmokedmax 8 years ago

Agreed.
Add to that, it was not part of the game originally, but was snuck into the game during patching/update to Rise & Fall.
I seriously hope they get nailed with the new European GPDR (sorry if that is out of order!) penalty for not making it OPT-IN as apparently required by that new law. Of course, that doesn’t help us in the US. I don’t think anything they did was illegal here, just shady. I expect things like that from services I get for free. NOT when I am their paying customer.
It’d really be a different story if there was a game reason for this. Like checking machine stats monitoring performance. But no, when you go to the Red Shell site, you can see the only thing they bring to the table is marketing/tracking. Their goal is to see how well ad campaigns do to see if money spent was worth it.
The real kicker is this… people who have opted out by communicating with Red Shell are basically just getting a cookie set in their browser. If you lose that cookie you need to go back to the site and opt back out again.
You switch browsers? you are back in.
You clean cookies? back in
Someone uses a device at your IP without that cookie? that device is now tied in (this may not be terrible, it’ll lead to bad data for them in the long run)
I’m **sure** they won’t be using that data to track other things you are doing. /sarcasm
Still haven’t play a bit since I first found out. Just puts me in too crappy a mood thinking about it. I have launched the game a couple times two days or so ago while testing the new “set launch options” I am using to make it default to DX12 instead of 11 at all times.

Thilaksha 8 years ago

Hey Nate, its me the Star Zeal Dev. Thanks for the update mention again. You pronounced my name pretty well 98%, only a few people can do that haha. I am also a male.
I just wanted to mention that the graphics in the game are certainly still work in progress but they will be somewhat cartoony/anime style in the end. IE, not meant to be realistic. I’m working on the graphics in layers where I go over and improve the details etc on them. The final few are coming next. You should be able to notice a small but gradual change over time from earliest to latest in the dev pics on indiegogo.

BLOODYBATTLEBRAIN 8 years ago

You remembered incorrectly. The maximum fight size in AoW3 was 7 stacks total, not 7 per side. That meant a 4 versus 3 fight.
When people say tedious, what it boils down to *too* much combat, as in too many fights, especially in larger maps.
New dev diary tomorrow!

eXplorminate 8 years ago

That’s what I meant. A total of 7 hexes.

Jodet 8 years ago

I looked up ‘tedious’ in the dictionary and it said ‘see Age of Wonders’.

BLOODYBATTLEBRAIN 8 years ago

@ Jodet, I looked up overrated disappointment in the dictionary, guess what I found?

Jodet 8 years ago

‘Endless Legend’ was an all-time favorite of mine. But somewhere about half-way through all the DLC releases the game balance was changed and it became really tedious. It would be great if ‘Inferno’ alleviated that, but that’s unlikely. The game companies always seem to pander to the grognards and not the ‘normal player’. And thanks to whoever does the show notes, they’re super useful.

Norsemanviking 8 years ago

I think you nailed it.

Jodet 8 years ago

Endless Legend Inferno looks… not so hot. Looking forward to your review.

eXplorminate 8 years ago

Lol, what’s not “hot” about it?

Jodet 8 years ago

Amplitude Studios are famous for their great art design. This? Not so much. Looks like it was done by a college art student. Really, that trailer… it’s a throw-away. I hope the ingame graphics and gameplay are up to Amplitudes high standards.

Paulo Marques 8 years ago

You can remove this comment if you want, this was too hotheaded, one-sided, mean, toxic and other bad things. I should rephrase and speak at another time.

Paulo Marques 8 years ago

Actually, you should remove the comment, if that’s ok.

Weekly eXchange #194 – War? Totally.