psyq

Codefloe is very nice and fast, and their CI can do Jsonnet instead of only dumb YAML.

I tried this right after Baby Steps (which I enjoyed a lot), because DS was one of the inspirations for Baby Steps. I did get some of the same vibes from DS and the areas I visited were beautiful. The atmosphere is great and all. But even without 100% it just feels like a slog in every other way. I think I didn’t even hit the 10 hour mark.

For a second I wanted to defend myself by saying “that’s just what I was told”, but I think that’s not even necessary, it seems it really is objectively a very odd game then, even for people who know the rules.

I can understand getting fun out of a bad game, I had fun in Two Worlds and other janky titles. And I see some “famous” streamers like Sseth just enjoy completely breaking all the systems in a bad game. My trouble is that I can’t recognize those systems in enough depth to start abusing them, that’s probably one reason EU4 didn’t click for me. I tried to just play it straight, and then you run into all those problems you mentioned. From what I casually observed in EU4 forums and the like, people really tear apart the systems to find anything that can be abused to their advantage.

Europa Universalis IV, 244 hours. I don’t think I understood a single thing of what was happening. And with every free update, some of the rules changed, sometimes in unpredictable ways.

I was told “don’t worry, even the big-brains who plan out their entire campaign with spreadsheets don’t really understand the mechanics”. But that’s no consolation, I felt stressed and confused for every single one of those hours.

May I just say that it’s so nice and refreshing to see lots of people mention these supposedly amazing 10/10 games in this thread and hate them, I largely feel the same about all those titles. I used to think my taste was just broken.