Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN MARCH 2024?

On Fri, 5 Apr 2024 20:42:35 -0500, Lane Larson
<lnlarson@stoat.inhoin.edu> wrote:

 

I never was into those at all.  If I am playing a space sim and there is
a 40 turn tutorial, I toss it out.  I prefer Master of Orion, Space
Empires, Ascendancy.  I think the word for it is self-explanatory.

Ascendancy... now there's a name I haven't heard in a long, long time.

It's one of those games I tried ever-so-hard to enjoy, but never quite
managed it. It's hard for me - especially now - to remember why,
although I recall that its aesthetics were a big turn-off. It wasn't
just the visuals, but how uninformative those visuals were. Take the
aliens: in MOO, it was fairly easy to glean - simply by appearance -
what each species was about. The big-headed psilons were techies; the
always-cloaked darloks were spies. You could quickly read the most
important aspects of each species simply by looking at them. Not so
with Ascendancy, where you'd have to carefully read the details of
each species to get the same info. And this sort of thing was rampant
in Ascendancy, from its tech tree to its planets. And this added
abstraction rarely added anything new to the 4X genre; it just made
things slower and weirder.

It's a game I played, quit, returned to, quit, returned to again, and
quit repeatedly, ultimately just going off to play "Master of Orion"
or something similar. It's probably a great game, but we never saw eye
to eye.