My Gaming updates....

Real life has been catching up on me again. Dental pain again is a bane but can't be helped, once it happens it happens all you can do is get things fixed or in my case medicated. That's not to say the last few weeks haven't had gaming. But I am going to be lazy and meld all that I want posted into one.

Cities Skylines is celebrating it's first birthday. The last few updates have updated the game to include some of the additions brought in the latest expansions. I like the way they do that. Its both an incentive to go and get the expansion and even if you can't/don't you wont' feel left out.  I have noticed that since the last patch there seems to have been tweaks to the way city traffic works. Maybe it's just me but I'm finding it a lot less of a nuisance at least in a new city I just created.

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My Terraria goes on but not as much as I'd like. I had a good gaming session with a RL friend the other night and got some cool goodies, ufo car key's, flaming armour/wings, flaming and eyeball shields, mini ufo combat pet and some cool weapons. It's a fun little game to hop in and out of. It doesn't take itself seriously and that all adds to the fun. I really like that your character is independent of the game world. So you can carry any items you want from one world to another or pillage a world and then bring all the goodies back to your own custom protected world.

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I've been enjoying the addition of the first of the Fallout 4 DLC "Automatron".

It's a fun story that also ties into the best side quest from the main game, the Silver Shroud. The DLC main "bad guy" is the Mechanist so it all ties in well.

I have done that play through of the new content with my "main", my first character but I can't see a lot of robots done by me being placed about my settlements. They are good but for now at least Sanctuary Hill is looking too much like a circus. So I'll hold off doing any.
My second playthrough is only just getting into the BOS storyline but can take the robot quest... I'm just not sure how to take it as I intend his storyline to be as a BOS lackey.

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I've taken a look the latest update to Star Citizen but it is still more of the same. Each patch needs to deliver something that people haven't seen before to keep interest going. There is only so much you can take in hearing so much from them. Only to see on login that my character still falls out of his cockpit. Or that the freaking Greycat still slides across the floor when you run into it. Experiencing that in game is a far cry from the likes of trailers like this one:

PCGamer did a Star Citizen section from GDC I think, it's new-ish video with old-ish info. The game has so much potential but a real lack on whats being delivered to actually "play" today really hurts. So many changes to such a large gaming ecosystem breaks a lot of things I can understand that. I think it will be two years before players get to see anything that resembles a complete game or even a Squadron 42 "module".

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I'm still getting to do some dailies in Star Trek Online. I've been ploughing away at the usual Officer and Fleet missions. Since last posting I've also claimed back a lot of EC (up to 5.3 Mill) and Dilithium (now up to 192k).

I've missed out on claiming the hero fleet ship from The Breach event which is a pity.

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I've been playing a bit of Darkest as well, but I have to admit that I've changed the game settings away from all difficulty options "on" as the game makers "intended". With those options off I've started to see what the Beta players were seeing and the changes that make it "normal" now are an insane (pun intended) jump in difficulty. I've got two campaigns on the go now, one on the "as intended" difficulty and the other with those options off. It's all part of the spice of the gameplay.

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There is still a lot of talk about the Citadel's and broker fee's in npc stations. Gevlon had an interesting post sharing his thoughts and getting many interesting comments. Not that I expect CCP to back down from the changes but they are changing the changes that they have posted but I'm sure the work in progress will screw over players in some other way.

The stats that CCP look at make me think that CCP is looking too hard at the statistics.

Speaking of isk there is an interesting read about making money both solo or with multiple accounts, but I'm sure that will all change after the next patch/expansion.

Of all the changes that have hit the active game I do like the new billboards that are in space:

The one really bad change that did hit the server and was promptly removed was the Gong.

I'm not a big fan of most of the changes coming Eve's way, but time will tell how it all pans out.

On other CCP news I read that Gunjack will be moving onward to available on the Oculus Rift but I think I'll still be waiting a year or more before I think about getting anything like the oculus.

I've not been playing much Eve other than keeping the daily grind alive, small but steady cash flow.
The only major thing I've done is to complete the Gallente Epic arc on my Gallente character. He is now fully integrated into that faction now. 


The ship I used with him for the arc was a Hyperion. And it took a massive beating. At one point I warped out of a mission at 25% hull. I never repaired the hull and I carried it through the entire arc as a badge of honour. One side effect of having such low hull strength is that the visual effect is very cool. No longer does your battered ship have a small plume of fire, it has the look of real internal damage.

Flickering lights / power failing

Engines failing

Add those effects on top of the addition of the built up dirt/grit carbon scoring and the ship is looking the worse for wear. I love it.

Damage done

Bringing an alt was essential

The mission rewards are like the arc itself, epic. WEll maybe not epic but a lot more than normal level 4's. 

That drone link end reward sell between 160 to 220 million depending on location and how fast you want the sale.

The arc is a hard nut to crack solo. I found my character starting to fail to complete the missions about half way through. One or two missions in the middle needed a lot of warp-outs to complete. But as the arc went on I found that my character was very much in need of backup. It just became more practical to get extra help. Despite how well trained my character is in Gallente ships and weapon systems. I ended up teaming him up with a missile boat, a raven that could tank and blast npc's from 150km away.
I cringe at how a solo player (sub 50 Million SP without level 5 skills in the likes of armour and weapons) would deal with this mission chain.
Even for me with 2 well trained characters was totally blunted and smacked about with in the second last combat mission. The "Showtime" mission NPC's have massive, really massive amounts of dps.
I've read online that players ignore the trigger ships and got all the reinforcement ships to spawn at once. That really would have been a nightmare to endure.
For me I found that doing things for that mission in this order was manageable:
Kill Frigs
Kill all but 1 cruisers
Kill all but one batttleships
Kill last cruiser
Kill new spawn npc's
Kill last bs
Kill the newly spawned ships

Sounds easy but in reality you are trying to manage ranges and reps.
All that while considering that in the time it takes to warp in and align you are already in half armour. I had a bookmark 100km from the missions initial warpin location in line with the top station in system. I would then bounce my ships, keeping aligned to the top station and warping out when needed. Then warping back to the point that was furthest from the bulk of the npc's as they close range fast sing micro warp drives. And when they get close they apply that dps with a vengeance.


Some of it was my won fault for pushing a ship through the arc with the same omni tank and using the same navy antimatter ammo. Moans and sighs of derision I can hear. But its the way I play and the way I wanted it. Spending the time to change tanking specs and getting and changing ammo types etc I doubt that it would have really changed the results on survivability or dps output.