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 Thea 2: the Shattering, Driftland: the Magic Revival, Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes, Age of Wonders: Planetfall, Stellaris, Alliance of the Sacred Suns and much much more. As well as continued coverage for your other favorite 4X and strategy games.
Music for eXplorminate by Mangadrive
Show Notes:
- Thea 2 update – 01:39
- Driftland: The Magic Revival update – 03:17
- Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes update – 05:10
- Age of Wonders: Planetfall update – 09:10
- Stellaris update – 17:25
- ParadoxCon is coming up. Tickets go on sale May 7th – 22:06
- Alliance of the Sacred Suns update – 23:12
- Total War: Warhammer 2 update – 26:34
- What is… Spaceland? – 29:04
- XCOM 2 Steam page
- You remember the game Nate is so profusely refusing to mention, eh?
Games we are playing / Things we are doing – 30:43
- Space Tyrant Steam page
- Endless Legend Steam page
- Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced edition Steam page
- Blood Bowl 2 Steam page
- eXplorminate Patreon Support page
Rob founded eXplorminate in 2014 as his passion for 4X needed an outlet. You can find Rob in just about every 4X game beta and 4X game forum, too. He’s equally obsessed with the strategy and tactics genres and constantly combs the internet for new and exciting titles in those genres. He’s proud to be a member of Amplitude Studios’ VIP program and the concept creator of Endless Space 2’s Unfallen.
So I dislike Fallen Enchantress and co, and the reason is that it has terrible, terrible performance. It just runs so badly, in comparison to similar games such as AoW3 and Endless Legend. And it’s something they never remedied. Elemental was slow. Fallen Enchantress was slow. Legendary Heroes was slow. Even Sorcerer King was slow! It rubs me the wrong way, and so my interest in the franchise is nil.
I hope they are working on that actually.
nice show, thanks.
currently also have a lot of fun playing divinity: original sin (on GoG).
pathfinder is on my list for playing after divinity:os, maybe picking it up in a sale or maybe i’ll
play divinity: original sin 2…..whichever has the best sale first 🙂
also still having fun playing some stellaris with a bunch of mods.
What about Pillars of Eternity 1/2, Tyranny?
Also, I picked up Divinity: Original Sin enhanced on a huge sale last year. I’m really, really enjoying it.
Pillars 1 is a great game, I played through it last summer. I know the pausable real-time combat is a turn off for some, especially coming off DOS with it’s turn based combat.
I liked the story which is more serious in tone, and I personally was a little turned off by DOS tongue in cheek humor besides the fact that the story didn’t grab me. I do want to give it another go for the combat though.
already played Pillars of Eternity 1 and it was good. but i like D:OS so i’ll stick with the second part or try another new, pathfinder kingmaker.
Pillars of Eternity 2 got turn based combat in a patch, and it’s supposedly pretty good (I haven’t played). Unfortunately the first game doesn’t seem about to get the same treatment, a shame because I like it well enough, except for the godawful RTWP combat.
Pause-able real-time has the best of both worlds. You have the greater realism of real-time but with the luxury to contemplate your tactics. Turn based combat can get silly and trivial in many games once you have developed your party. Every combat you can cripple the enemies on the first turn whilst they stand around letting you do it and never have a chance to respond or do anything.
Great show, as usual.
Q2 2019 is showing a lot of promise, especially coming off of a lackluster 2018.
Hey guys, just a heads up about a possible technical issue. Is your podcast server possibly having issues this week? I have been unable to download your podcast this week using the iOS podcast app. It keeps giving an error message along the lines of “something bad happened try again later”. It’s been like that for a few days, and is only happening with the eXplorminate podcast, no others. Additionally when I tried to unsubscribe then resubscribe in an attempt to fix the problem, the app would not allow me to resubscribe, with an error message like “server unavailable”.
Wow, okay. Thanks for the heads up. I forwarded your response to them.
Thanks for the episode! Just a couple of points on the AoW: Planetfall update:
1. First, the Medici were indeed from Florence – they started as a merchant family and gradually became the ruling family of all of Tuscany (the region where Florence is located). Their wealth was based on mercantile and banking activities, so I can see why Nate thought of them as Venetian.
2. I am almost certain the second family Nate was thinking about (and whose name he could not recall) were the Borgias (which, with the Medici, are the most generally “famous” Italian Renaissance family). They are generally represented in fiction as being quite “evil”/depraved (e.g., they are the bad guys in Assassin’s Creed 2), but I am not sure how accurate that is. They are also quite different from the Medici – they were actually of Spanish origin, and are most famous for their link with and influence in the Catholic Church rather than for mercantile activities.
3. Like Troy, I was a bit “puzzled” by how the faction was presented in the Developer Diary. I understand the point Nate was trying to make (i.e., it is interesting to have games which do not ignore problematic parts of human history); however, to me the developers gave the impression of simply picking elements of other cultures and historical times which they found “cool” and “evil” to create a “fun” faction – I do not think there was anything particularly deep or well-thought about it, or that they wanted to seriously engage with human history.
This is linked to a more general worry I have regarding Planetfall: while I have very high expectations, its tone is something I am not completely sold on. Based on what they have shown so far (e.g., the trailer, developer diaries, the pieces of lore associated with each unit shown) it seems to wander from quite serious to extremely silly – I am not sure there is an incredibly strong vision behind it. For instance, the lore surrounding the Kir’ko seems to be on the serious side, while the dinosaur-riding amazons appear extremely campy.
Yup, that’s the one.