Chess and DND and Delicious Birthday Meats
It's been a whirlwind couple of days since my last post. After work yesterday, I met up with my friends to play D&D for our weekly session. The campaign is themed around a "modern" setting (it is set in the 1980s in Tampa), and it's always a blast, even if we spend half the session just bullshitting with each other and catching up after a long week of work. Even if these sessions don't tick off all the boxes for what D&D "is" for many people, it is at least a great chance to unwind and welcome the weekend.
In this particular episode, we slaughtered what was possibly an elder god slug that may have been an ally if we hadn't used fireball in his temple. Woops. And one of our characters had a... very risque encounter with a Siren. For all the shitty tropes about terrible D&D groups, we had never come this close to just roleplaying a sexual encounter. Until last night of course. The important thing is that the Siren did the walk of shame, we won the fight against the elder slug, and the party is barely clinging to life in the bottom of a temple located beneath Busch Gardens, accompanied by an NPC wearing a monkey costume (he works at Busch gardens and is too precious for this world).
Today I woke up and spent some good time bonding with Holly over some videogames. Valve just dropped Dota Underlords, which is their proper stand-alone version of AutoChess.
I got into AutoChess pretty late, only having played a couple of rounds within Dota2. I have played the mobile version quite a bit though, having won quite a few games and worked my way up to knight-8 in ranked.
Underlords is functionally the same game as the previous two with a couple of small changes and one pretty large one. And it's this large change that will keep me playing Underlords over the mobile offering. Let me explain because I think this is an interesting design decision.
First, some background on Autochess. Autochess is the frontrunner in the emergent Autobattler genre. Essentially, the gameplay loop is such that you have a field (chessboard) where you will buy units one by one, and then fight one of the other 7 other players in your match. If you win, you don't take any damage. If you lose, you take damage based on the number of remaining units alive on your opponent's side. Once you receive 100 damage, you lose.
I can't stress this enough, the game is centered around auto-battling. This means that you don't actually control your units. Instead, the game is all about making these macro decisions. You are given gold based on your performance, and how you spend that gold will shape your entire run. "Do I reshuffle the unit shop (at the cost of gold) to possibly get an upgrade for my board, or do I bank my gold for a later turn when there are better options available?"
One of the most fundamental concepts to the game is that of items. On rounds 1,2,3,5,10,15,20...etc you fight against a "monster team" (ai controlled). If you kill the monsters, they have a CHANCE of dropping an item that you can equip to your characters. This is the ONLY method of attaining items in the game, you cannot purchase them from the shop. Furthermore, these items are paramount to you having a successful run. Even if you do everything right, you could still lose to an opponent that got lucky and got a powerful item and equipped it on their strongest unit. This just feels terrible because, in a game that's all about big decisions, a lot of outcomes can come down to the luck of the draw with items. I've had games where I didn't even get a single item. I've had games where I've gotten 4 items in the first three rounds and steamrolled my way to victory.
And this is where Underlords succeeds. Underlords kept about 95% of the same units as Autochess, and most of those units perform identically to their autochess counterpart. They cost the same in the shop, they have the same abilities, etc. But what they did wildly different was change their item system. In Underlords, after a monster round, if you killed the monster team, the game automatically gives you a choice of 1 of 3 items after the round. If you lost to the monster team, Underlords locks 2 of the items, so you are forced to take the 3rd one, whether it's suitable for your team or not. The big difference though is that every player gets precisely one item after every monster round. No more, no less.
Additionally, Underlords limits a hero to be able to carry only a single item. This prevents you from just stacking everything on your best guy and creating an unkillable Voltron. Instead, you have to make more decisions about which items go where, which is actually very refreshing and fun. Additionally, they also implemented passive items which will give you a strong bonus passively across your whole team, but only if they meet the requirements. So, for example, you may get an item that says "all your trolls inspire their allies, giving any ally within 1 square +35% attack speed". This item sucks if you haven't invested in trolls, but if you have a troll based team, it FEELS great.
Underlords is still in early access/beta, and there's still plenty of changes to be made. But it's addicting and fun as hell. If anyone reading this gives it a try (it's free to play, no ads, no microtransactions), then let me know!
This evening I met up with some of my best friends and had dinner at Texas de Brazil to celebrate my 34th birthday (Monday). This was a delight as always, and it benefited greatly by being limited to a smaller group than last year. There were some people I really wish I could have seen, but honestly, anything more than a table of 10 becomes unmanageable in an environment like that.
Afterward we went to The Pub in International Plaza, which is a swanky UK themed restaurant. Had whiskey and the tiniest bite of bread pudding (omg bread pudddding). Spend 3 hours just hanging out and shooting the shit with good people. I'm so thankful every day for this great group of friends I've somehow managed to curate over the years. You all are awesome. Much love!
Sunday, the plan is to get chores done and work a little in Unity before my buddy comes over in the evening to pick up where we left off on our game of Divinity Original Sin 2. We are about 7 hours in, and it's already just so good that I can't stop thinking about it throughout the week. We only meet for a few hours every Sunday to play, so it's going to take a while to get through this one. I'm looking forward to every step of the way, though!
Thanks for reading, as always!
In this particular episode, we slaughtered what was possibly an elder god slug that may have been an ally if we hadn't used fireball in his temple. Woops. And one of our characters had a... very risque encounter with a Siren. For all the shitty tropes about terrible D&D groups, we had never come this close to just roleplaying a sexual encounter. Until last night of course. The important thing is that the Siren did the walk of shame, we won the fight against the elder slug, and the party is barely clinging to life in the bottom of a temple located beneath Busch Gardens, accompanied by an NPC wearing a monkey costume (he works at Busch gardens and is too precious for this world).
Today I woke up and spent some good time bonding with Holly over some videogames. Valve just dropped Dota Underlords, which is their proper stand-alone version of AutoChess.
I got into AutoChess pretty late, only having played a couple of rounds within Dota2. I have played the mobile version quite a bit though, having won quite a few games and worked my way up to knight-8 in ranked.
Underlords is functionally the same game as the previous two with a couple of small changes and one pretty large one. And it's this large change that will keep me playing Underlords over the mobile offering. Let me explain because I think this is an interesting design decision.
First, some background on Autochess. Autochess is the frontrunner in the emergent Autobattler genre. Essentially, the gameplay loop is such that you have a field (chessboard) where you will buy units one by one, and then fight one of the other 7 other players in your match. If you win, you don't take any damage. If you lose, you take damage based on the number of remaining units alive on your opponent's side. Once you receive 100 damage, you lose.
I can't stress this enough, the game is centered around auto-battling. This means that you don't actually control your units. Instead, the game is all about making these macro decisions. You are given gold based on your performance, and how you spend that gold will shape your entire run. "Do I reshuffle the unit shop (at the cost of gold) to possibly get an upgrade for my board, or do I bank my gold for a later turn when there are better options available?"
One of the most fundamental concepts to the game is that of items. On rounds 1,2,3,5,10,15,20...etc you fight against a "monster team" (ai controlled). If you kill the monsters, they have a CHANCE of dropping an item that you can equip to your characters. This is the ONLY method of attaining items in the game, you cannot purchase them from the shop. Furthermore, these items are paramount to you having a successful run. Even if you do everything right, you could still lose to an opponent that got lucky and got a powerful item and equipped it on their strongest unit. This just feels terrible because, in a game that's all about big decisions, a lot of outcomes can come down to the luck of the draw with items. I've had games where I didn't even get a single item. I've had games where I've gotten 4 items in the first three rounds and steamrolled my way to victory.
And this is where Underlords succeeds. Underlords kept about 95% of the same units as Autochess, and most of those units perform identically to their autochess counterpart. They cost the same in the shop, they have the same abilities, etc. But what they did wildly different was change their item system. In Underlords, after a monster round, if you killed the monster team, the game automatically gives you a choice of 1 of 3 items after the round. If you lost to the monster team, Underlords locks 2 of the items, so you are forced to take the 3rd one, whether it's suitable for your team or not. The big difference though is that every player gets precisely one item after every monster round. No more, no less.
Additionally, Underlords limits a hero to be able to carry only a single item. This prevents you from just stacking everything on your best guy and creating an unkillable Voltron. Instead, you have to make more decisions about which items go where, which is actually very refreshing and fun. Additionally, they also implemented passive items which will give you a strong bonus passively across your whole team, but only if they meet the requirements. So, for example, you may get an item that says "all your trolls inspire their allies, giving any ally within 1 square +35% attack speed". This item sucks if you haven't invested in trolls, but if you have a troll based team, it FEELS great.
Underlords is still in early access/beta, and there's still plenty of changes to be made. But it's addicting and fun as hell. If anyone reading this gives it a try (it's free to play, no ads, no microtransactions), then let me know!
This evening I met up with some of my best friends and had dinner at Texas de Brazil to celebrate my 34th birthday (Monday). This was a delight as always, and it benefited greatly by being limited to a smaller group than last year. There were some people I really wish I could have seen, but honestly, anything more than a table of 10 becomes unmanageable in an environment like that.
Afterward we went to The Pub in International Plaza, which is a swanky UK themed restaurant. Had whiskey and the tiniest bite of bread pudding (omg bread pudddding). Spend 3 hours just hanging out and shooting the shit with good people. I'm so thankful every day for this great group of friends I've somehow managed to curate over the years. You all are awesome. Much love!
Sunday, the plan is to get chores done and work a little in Unity before my buddy comes over in the evening to pick up where we left off on our game of Divinity Original Sin 2. We are about 7 hours in, and it's already just so good that I can't stop thinking about it throughout the week. We only meet for a few hours every Sunday to play, so it's going to take a while to get through this one. I'm looking forward to every step of the way, though!
Thanks for reading, as always!
"I'm going to ready my action to go in when dick out".
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