Tied Up A Loose End

I went back over the last few days and finished up The Banner Saga, which I began playing back in January. That was a really great game.


It's set in a very interesting non-standard fantasy world and tells a pretty desperate story of refugees on the move fleeing before a deadly and merciless invading force. The ending of the game does not really wrap  up anything at all, so there is much more of the story left to tell. I understand there will be another game or two--they're calling it a trilogy at this point, but there's no word yet on when a sequel will arrive. I am definitely interested in continuing the story though, and learning more about this world and the forces behind what seems like a forced migration caused by another forced migration caused by an unknown "darkness".


The art and presentation of the game are peerless in many respects, and the tactical battle system is novel, forcing you to break habits ingrained by other tactical roleplaying games. It is overall a very nice little package, lasting about 12 hours for a once-through. It's definitely on my shortlist for 2014 GsOTY.

Beyond Beyond Earth

The other night I finished up my fourth game of Civ in a row, 2 of Beyond Earth, one of V, and then another of Beyond Earth.


I managed to actually win the last one, going down the Harmony affinity path to the Transcendence victory. I noticed fairly early on that I shared a continent with only two other factions, one with only two cities, and the other a little bigger, with four. By this point I probably had nine, and a healthy military, so without much trouble at all, and very few losses, I dominated both other factions and brought the whole continent under my control. From there it was just a matter of expansion and being on the lookout for any border incursions while I exploited (or rather... harmonized) the land's resources and rushed to build the Mind Flower for the win.


After four full games and about 50 hours of Civ, I think it's time to move on to play other things. I'm not certain yet just what I'll focus on, but I did flirt a little with Diablo III and XCOM: Enemy Unknown last night.

Anything Less Would Be... Uncivilized

I'm a couple of games into Beyond Earth, now. My first game I played as Kavitha Thukar, which I think is the faction whose cities expand to new tiles at twice the usual rate. I was going for Supremacy, and still figuring things out when the victory was snatched out from under me by the African faction. In my second game, I was playing as the Franco-Iberians, focused on Purity and culture, basically building The Imperium of Man pre-Heresy. Everything was rolling along real well until out of nowhere ARC (the American analogue) runs off with the Contact victory. No one else stood a chance.


Beyond Earth is very cool. It is a whole lot like Civ V, but there are some interesting differences aside from just in the theme. The win conditions are different, depending on your affinity (Purity, Supremacy, or Harmony), The tech progression is also interestingly different in that it is a web rather than a tree, which makes sense since this is about civilizations branching out from a common start rather than making the same progression in parallel, just with paces staggered.


Speaking of Civ V, I just kind of wanted to check it out again after finishing a couple of games of the new one, and I got back in and am getting toward the end of a game as Venice, with which you are limited to a single city, and fumbling toward a culture victory. It probably won't work, at this point, but I'm still having a great time messing around with it. This is the first I've really played much with the expansions active, and the religion/culture and endgame stuff they added to the game is pretty substantial, not to mention all of the factions now part of the game that weren't in there, before.


I think it's great that Civ V and Beyond Earth can exist at once and both be unique while still sharing 90% of the same DNA. Neither makes the other feel obsolete or pointless.


Not much to report, outside of Civilization games. I played another short session of Shadow of Mordor. It's cool, but I'll need more time to get into it.