#Geoscape

[samueldays]

Sam Reviews: Phoenix Point, part 1

Phoenix Point is down to ten bucks on GOG, DLC included!

I bought it, figuring even a half-decent XCOM clone is worth it for ten bucks. So far it feels like a $10 game indeed. I'm probably not going to finish it before the sale ends, I have a job, so here's my initial impressions for those interested and I'll come back with part 2 later.

Tutorial missions, fine. First regular mission against crab monsters, fine. Second regular mission pits me against gun-happy human bandits, and I am unpleasantly surprised that they return fire whenever they're shot at, getting 4 counter-attacks in a turn if 4 people shoot at them, they even "return fire" upon having a grenade thrown at them.

Solution: run up and bash them in the head with the butt of a gun repeatedly, they don't get to return fire from that. I grumbled about that, and the game feels like 'that' repeatedly.

I didn't like the puzzle boss nature of infinite return fire. One return fire per turn would have been cool, and enabled tactical counterplay options. Unlimited return fire breaks the action economy, breaks my immersion for the game abstraction of "action points", and makes me feel this is going to be a game about cheesing AP limits and ruleslawyer combos. Also, the infinite return fire ability was on multiple nameless minions in that mission, not even reserved for a boss. Bash bash bash bash!

I didn't like the lack of game hints in this context. I had Hints turned on for a first run at low difficulty. The Hints make suggestions for what to research, how game mechanics work, and provide informative popups the first time a new strain of crab monster appears. But there was no Hint popup about the first encounter with an enemy having the Return Fire ability, no tooltip on mouseover of enemy, nor was there any indication of what actions trigger Return Fire, despite this being significantly more impactful than "this crab monster regenerates".

I didn't like the solution, which felt like a rules loophole rather than a sensible way to approach rapid-firing enemies. Oh yeah here's a guy who can interrupt your turn to shoot multiple times per turn, you should all walk up to him and punch him and he'll politely submit to the beatings.

I really didn't like that compared to recent XCOM games, Phoenix Point added a micromanagement tracker for Weapon Durability, and bashing the return-fire-goons in the head damages your weapon! Also they brought back ammo management, so now your weapon has two stats that can run out during combat.

But I also recognize that these things aren't bugs or crashes or typos or other objectively wrong things about the game, they're design decisions that I disagree with. The game runs fine. I have a series of grumbles and no dealbreakers.

Moving on from the Return Fire-associated crap...

This is an XCOM-genre game, definitely. It has base building, squad management, research and production, capturing crab monsters for research, psychic mind control, a strategic "Geoscape" layer and numerous tactical battle missions. The one thing that's oddly missing is gear upgrades. New gear is mostly sidegrades and tactical options, on the other hand it offers far stronger character upgrades than in most XCOM games, to the point of looking partly like a CRPG with classes, levels and skill points.

The Geoscape has more content than the waiting game that was some previous xcoms. There are other factions moving on the map, there's some trade and diplomacy with them, there are unknown sites to explore, you reactivate old bases instead of building them from scratch. Sometimes this means clearing them of crab monsters.

The Phoenix Point interface inherits a lot of XCOM 2's cutscenery that I dislike. It is very beautiful, very zoomed in, and wants to make sure you see it. There's frequent waiting to watch stuff resolve, and the game insists on having the camera follow unimportant actions like the run animation of every soldier's every move, and locking the interface during this. Move orders (particularly out of sight of enemies) should not hog control, I should be able to tab to the next soldier and begin giving a new move order immediately after the previous! Each individual animation is short, but multiply it by several soldiers, on each of several turns, on each of several missions, and my frustration at an unresponsive interface accumulates.

The zoom-out is limited. Soldiers will frequently be so far away from each other that I can't see them on the same screen, and have to pan back and forth. Bleh.

The gun system is quite detailed with damage types, damage values, accuracy modifiers, weapon ranges, armor, armor-shredding weapons, body part targeting and hit location, disabled limbs, bleeding, cover, et cetera. The game then offers options to skip a lot of this gunnery where enemies get to resist, and instead go for special abilities that Just Work, like War Cry:

AOE, autohit, no save, renders most enemies unable to attack for a turn.

About that limbs stuff, Phoenix Point has tried hard to make hit locations relevant. Crab monsters have game-relevant organs and limbs that can be disabled for far less damage than it takes to kill the whole monster. It's neat, but feels a little underwhelming. I don't blame the devs much for this, balance is hard when there's hefty player optionality plus RNG, and there's a fine line between making targeting relevant and making a monster the Shootmeinthegland monster where shooting it in the gland simply becomes the new default target instead of shooting it in the head/center mass.

Guns are weak, and armor is powerful as part of making limb targeting relevant. Also, armor-shredding weapons. This feels related to the CRPG class-and-level stuff: with the smaller squad and the more personalized characters and the more important individuals, the game has to give more leeway for characters to survive being hit to avoid player frustration. We've moved a long way from X-COM:UFO where casualties were routine and replacements were cheap.

I don't know if it's good or bad that the game plays "fair" about the least relevant nameless NPCs being similarly padded, but I know one of my mutuals will hate this combination of health padding and detailed targeting:

I have caught this thief at close range (2 tiles). I am about to launch a six-round burst from my character's assault rifle into his head. The targeting reticle, the highlighted yellow outline, and the info popup all agree that these bullets will go into his head if I fire here and now. The segmented bar at the top indicates that the result of close-range burst fire to the head through the front of the face is that the thief will lose about half his hitpoints.

To underscore that I've gotten a head hit, not a glancing blow off the helmet, the game displays the thief with a bloody face and blood-splattered clothes after the shot. But he lives. Somehow.

There's also a plot to Phoenix Point. I don't play xcoms for the plot, but there's definitely been some work on the plot beyond "kill and loot aliums :)". After the second world war, blah blah secret organization, moonbase, something something precursor civilization. It looks like good lore, I'll re-read the accumulated notes when I have more notes and fewer darkly hinting clue-scraps bereft of context.

(update: part 2)

[velvetyraincoat]

Terra Invicta uses in-game mechanics to present the most powerful and compelling media depiction of mutually assured destruction I’ve ever seen. So for those of you who haven’t played this game (you should), I want to explain it.

As the governing body in a country that has access to a nuclear arsenal, it’s incredibly easy to press the big red button and initiate a nuclear exchange. You can do this pretty much at the start of the game even.

There’s no real guard rails in the game to prevent you from doing this, since the executive power in a nuclear armed country can just kinda do that. And, if you get yourself into a bind, the button is right there, tempting you with the power of the atom as the great equaliser against even conventional powers who are much stronger than you. Your enemies can be annihilated in an instant if only you launch the missiles…

The fact that it’s so incredibly tempting in a bad situation yet so quick and easy to press the button captures exactly what makes nuclear weapons so terrifying.

So what happens if you actually press it and start a nuclear war? Well, you see a couple small contrail streaks on the globe as the missiles launch and most likely a tiny and easy to miss notification in the corner of your screen informing you of a nuclear retaliation. And that’s that.

There’s no big dramatic moment of cinematic glory, no gaudy “game over” screen or anything like that. No, your game does not end. Life just goes on as if nothing had happened. The geoscape tints ever so slightly darker as nuclear fallout enters the stratosphere and the world gets colder.

Then, as you take a closer look at the remaining nations, the economic ramifications of what you just did begin to immediately mount up. Countries that were once economic powerhouses experience an unfathomable contraction to a hundredth of their GDP overnight. Social turmoil abounds and governments of the nations who still exist are shaken to the core, stretched to a shadow of their former ability.

Terra Invicta makes a point of showing the player that nuclear war is not some glorious dramatic spectacle. What is effectively the end of the world is portrayed as just another Tuesday. You can keep playing, but your chances of ever defeating the alien invaders are utterly extinguished as the world economy is in shambles.

It's a banal apocalypse-- billions are instantly dead, your playthrough is doomed by all metrics, and you're left to think about whether pressing that big red button was really worth it after all.

[modded-xcom2-aar]

The Tutorial: Part 1

Dan's Notes: Due to the more cinematic, cutscene-heavy nature of the opening tutorial mission, the whole of it has been depicted in video form. This will not be the case with most missions. It should also be noted that the tutorial is skippable, as are the DLC missions, but for the sake of storytelling, I have enabled them. In addition, this update will be a fair bit longer than most updates will so I can get all the tutorial stuff out of the way.

Operation Gatecrasher After Action Report

After 20 years of struggling and acting underground, XCOM was finally able to perform Operation Gatecrasher, a combined effort by XCOM and the Reapers to locate and rescue Commander , the original operating commander of XCOM. Due to the high-priority nature of this mission, XCOM was forced to execute the mission through unusual and unconventional means.

Operating in this mission were rookie-level soldiers Jane Kelly, Peter Osei, Ana Ramirez, Reaper soldier Elena "Outrider" Dragunova, and Central Command Officer Bradford. Osei and Ramirez were killed in action while the surviving rookie, Kelly, was promoted to a Squaddie-class Ranger. In accordance to XCOM's agreement, Dragunova fled the scene before the deployment of XCOM's forces, rejoining with the nearest group of Reapers.

Thanks to the distraction created by Bradford and Kelly, as well as the efforts of Dragunova, city center forces were minimal during the rescue operation, limited to a handful of troops and a group of reinforcements.

Tutorial Geoscape, Part 1

Dan's Notes: During the recording, this cutscene stuttered, causing audio lag and making it a pain to watch. I have taken this footage from a compilation of cutscenes from the vanilla game. Credit to LFP Gaming for creating the original video, XCOM 2 All Cinematics / Cutscenes / Movie. All other cutscenes posted in this update were taken from my personal recording, and any future instances of outscourcing cutscenes will be noted.

Excerpt from Central Officer Bradford's Journal:

While I was acting undercover, I noticed a lot of commotion about it being the 20th anniversary of the "formation of the ADVENT Coalition". That's a load of bull. Just about any world leader that didn't willingly turn on humanity was being manipulated into doing so, usually with psionic mind control. 20 years, huh? You know, they say you get older your perception of time starts to speed up, but I remember every agonizing moment that led up to this point. Years of travelling and scraping by, slowly finding any other wandering survivors, hearing word of resistance groups until ultimately forming my own and branding it with those four letters I held onto to remember what once was. Osei and Ramirez might have just seemed like just another dissident to the ADVENT troops that slaughtered them, but I'll always remember their parts in reassembling XCOM.

One shower and a set of fresh clothes later, the Commander was ready to go to the science labs.

Dan's notes: The Commander is never given a canonical name, gender, speaking lines, or appearance. The Commander is effectively you, the person playing the video game. I think it's fun for players to create some kind of commandersona, so I have decided to create one. The core idea was to make someone comically unassuming for their elevated status within the fiction. One thing to note is that there isn't really any way to make a fat character in this game, and I'm pretty sure it would be a pain for a modder to pull off without serious clipping issues. As such, I decided to make the Commander fat.

Excerpt from Commander Stumpe's Journal:

Gosh, it's all so darn confusing. It felt like I had been on the longest war of my career, but then one day I find myself getting pulled out of a spacesuit and I'm told the whole thing ended 20 years ago. Jeez, I really hope maybe I can turn things around this time.

At the behest of Chief Science Officer Tygan, Commander ordered the Science team

Excerpt from Commander Stumpe's journal:

Dunno why he called himself a Chief Science Officer when it was really just him and any guy he trusted enough to handle equipment. Odd fellow, that guy. Wonder what happened to Vahlen.

Having survived Operation Gatecrasher, Jane Kelly was promoted from Rookie to Squaddie. Kelly had decided to specialize as a Ranger.

Dan's notes: Although they served as scout units in the vanilla game, their real specialties are their shotguns, which have a higher crit rate than other weapons, and goes up the more up close and personal the Ranger gets. Reapers and Templars outdo them on both stealth and melee terms.

Shortly afterwards, Commander Stumpe was invited by Central Officer Bradford to come to the research labs.

END OF PART 1

[zemalf]

130 | The World of Terrifying Silence (Run 3) | Geoscape, base work, research, mission https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTdHfhO7wQ8

[companionwolf]

wolf's combined fictotype playlist

commander awakens - xcom 2 ost

mars - sleeping at last

ARK - soma ost

goodbye to a world - porter robinson

i'm your man - mitski

geoscape - xcom 2 ost (tlp)

black hole pulse - the garages

pvrker's lament - the garages

firewalker with me (riley) - the garages

rise up in the dirt - voxtrot

the seista of internet league blaseball - the garages

ENCORE - no risk

RIV - the garages

get normal - the garages

[Note: the order of these songs is very important. Black Hole Pulse bridges the playlist and fits both fictotypes.]

[volgotha]

Its always map music I stg. The last map music that made me remember certain "eras" in my life, if you will, were "Geoscape" from ET Extra Terrestrial and "Galaxy" from Mass Effect. This one from Helldivers 2 makes me feel like, this is it, like I'm standing on the precipice of my dreams. I finally found a competent programmer, and he's ready to make a game with me. Programmer, Artist, Musician. I have who I need now to make a game. I'm getting married next summer so an incredible, handsome man, with a wonderful family, soon to be in-laws, and great friends who've all welcomed me with open arms. I never thought I'd be here, but I am. I made it. Somehow, I made it.

[justxcomthings]

[image source]

JXT: Having Betos on Speed Dial Because She’s the Only One You Can Trust

[thinkslikesrocks]

I love how otherworldly land looks from the sky. These are Google Maps clips of Eastern Oregon, near where I live. 

[joshuaburd-blog]

Geoscape from a couple weeks ago. #pdxtattoo #pdxart #portlandtattoo #portlandart #mountain #geoscape #landscapetattoo #geometrictattoo #lineworktattoo #dotworktattoo #dynamicink #elitecartridges #equaliserpritonpen https://www.instagram.com/p/B4YAbLXh3OD/?igshid=166197n14103w

[hidingmurklins]

A geoscape poster I'm supposed to study: "Only 5% of Canada is prime agricultural land [Class 1-3 soils]."

Me: Please don't do this to me

Poster: "...80% of the GTA [Greater Toronto Area] was originally covered by soils of these classes"

[hardcore-gaming-101]

Advance Wars: Dual Strike

In an attempt to repeat the success of Advance Wars, the early outings of the DS saw the addition of Advance Wars: Dual Strike. Seemingly trying to do things sufficiently different, Dual Strike takes place upon another continent in a different area of the Wars World geoscape called Omegaland. Recognizing Black Hole as an international threat, the four nations have formed the Allied Nations and have deployed various COs in an effort to curb the threat there. While the preceding game featured many of the same COs, and added some new ones on top of that, Dual Strike takes a bit of a different approach, introducing the player to new COs first and familiar ones later. Dropping the ball however is the villainous cast, with two of the new COs being borderline copy-pastes of ones introduced in Advance Wars 2. 

Read more...

[dotsenough]

#belindamooreart #geoscapes #banburyartist #shape #pattern #primarycolours #textiledesign #posca (at Banbury, Oxfordshire) https://www.instagram.com/p/B0KyJZLHC1J/?igshid=1gc27kll6eg7d

[vfdinthewild]

“Vancouver-FraserDelta”

-page title for the Geoscape Vancouver Fraser River Delta page

[kuramirocket]

OKALHOMA CITY - Supporters of a permanent Mexican Consulate in Oklahoma are calling on the community to take action. 

Scissortail Community Development Corporation President Robert Ruiz said opening a Mexican consulate in Oklahoma City would make a big difference for Mexican citizens who are trying to conduct daily business. 

Forms of identification, legal matters, property and employment documents, and more are services provided by a foreign consulate.

Some people are having to drive to the nearest Mexican Consulate, which is in Little Rock, Arkansas, to appear in person to get legal forms of identification required to apply for bank accounts or lines of credit. 

During COVID, this became an issue as fewer appointment times were available, and the mobile consulate that spent some time in Oklahoma City spent less time traveling, he said. 

“Especially during the time of COVID, a lot of citizens were going without these services,” Ruiz said. 

But this comes after about 10 years of effort to bring a permanent consulate to Oklahoma.

The Hispanic population in Oklahoma is growing in economic influence. 

About 440,000 Hispanic people live in the state, according to 2019 U.S. Census data. 

About 84% are of Mexican decent, according to Geoscape, American Marketplace Datastream 2019 Series. 

The consulate is expected to draw thousands of people from surrounding states to receive services. 

“This doesn’t only affect citizens of Mexico, it affects local businesses, local communities. It is going to impact a lot of business and areas for a lot of us,” Miriam Campos, a trustee for the Oklahoma City Economic Development Trust said. 

Banks in the city are seeing these issues firsthand. 

“We want to serve our members our customers through mainstream financial services -- savings accounts, bank accounts and checking accounts, and also loans. Without a proper identification [from the consulate], we’re not able to do that for residents who are still citizens of Mexico without services provided by the consulate,” Brent Rempe, Allegiance Credit Union Chief Revenue Officer said. 

Rempe said high risk, high interest loans from predatory lenders are an unsafe alternative that some people turn to when they cannot access a mainstream financial option. 

Now, a community letter writing campaign is underway to demonstrate community support for the consulate to the Mexican foreign affairs office. 

“Already from yesterday afternoon to today, we’ve had almost 3,000 people send letters of support to the Secretary of Foreign Affairs in Mexico,” Ruiz said. 

The consulate could also be located in Tulsa. 

Information about how to send a letter can be found here. 

[wrentallan]

The geoscape doesn’t show anything because all the alternate dimensions are gone now ☠️

[fatehbaz]

Subterranean streams in karst cave systems provide for sustained biodiversity in old-growth rainforest of Vancouver Island - and due to a 2014 forest fire, researchers now see the cave systems as far more important than previously recognized

This is a “karst window” on Vancouver Island, a feature that occurs when subterranean streams temporarily reemerge on the surface. This photo also features Dr. Carol Ramsey, a prominent local researcher of karst systems. [Photo by Grant Callegari and publicized by journalist Bruce Grierson.]

Dr. Ramsey joins another prominent local scientist, Dr. Paul Griffiths. [Photo by Grant Callegari, publicized by Bruce Greirson.]

Diagram of karst cave system. From McColl, K. M. et al. (2005) Geoscape Nanaimo, geoscience for central Vancouver Island communities. Geological Survey of Canada, Mischellaneous Report 87.

Dr. Ramsey inspecting a karst cave entrance. [Photo by Grant Callegari, via Bruce Grierson.]

In 2014, a forest fire ravaged an area of extensive clear-cutting at Kinman, in the Hankin Range of northern Vancouver Island. Since the fire cleared the forest floor of moss, stumps, and debris, a hidden and enormous limestone karst formation was exposed.

This kind of karst ecosystem is pretty common on Vancouver Island. Though, this recent exposure provided new research opportunities for the several ecologists and geologists who have specialized in studying the island’s caves for the past few decades.

This is a photo of the Kinman area, where the 2014 fire exposed extensive karst. [”Reporter Larry Pynn stands atop a charred old-growth stump within a karst limestone landscapes ...” Vancouver Sun, 2018.

Researchers Ramsey and Griffiths feature prominently in recent reporting on karst systems. Here’s an excerpt from the Vancouver Sun: “Globally significant karst and old-growth ecosystems at risk on Vancouver Island.” Larry Pynn - 19 March 2018.

Clear cool streams once flowed through humid old-growth forests rich in lifeforms on northern Vancouver Island. Today, the site is a virtual dead zone, fireweed poking through the rubble the only sign of life.

In 2014, a wildfire swept through the Western Forest Products clearcut, high above Nimpkish Lake, and the thin layer of soil disappeared through fissures and openings in the limestone karst.

Ironically, the only thing that stopped the fire was a patch of old-growth trees that Western had not cut down. The standing rainforest lacked the dry wood debris left behind after logging that fueled the fire.

“It’s a different microclimate under the canopy of an old-growth forest,” explains B.C. karst expert Paul Griffiths. “You get a few downed trees, but generally they are moss covered.”

The fire burned 165 hectares, an estimated 89 hectares of that over karst.

Karst is a fragile type of topography that develops when water dissolves soluble bedrock — predominantly limestone on Vancouver Island, a Canadian hot spot for karst. The gradual process can form caves or caverns, passageways, creeks and springs, sinkholes, and fantastic but easily damaged speleothems such as columns, curtains, flowstone, soda straws, stalactites and stalagmites.

Karst also makes for more productive rainforests, draining away extensive rainfall while the dissolved cracks in the bedrock give tree roots a good foothold against powerful winter winds. Karst also reduces the acidity of rainfall, providing improved habitat for aquatic life, including resident and migratory fish.

Researchers Griffiths and Carol Ramsey have been fighting for years for better protection of karst landscapes on Vancouver Island, especially those associated with old-growth forests.

Griffiths describes this particular karst area as “very significant,” arguing it should not have been extensively clearcut. The fact that it was with no apparent attempt to protect karst features highlights the need for the province to improve the level of protection and ensure in-the-field inspections.

[Source.]

A “karst spring” - where subterranean water feeds back onto the surface - near Port Aberni. [Source.]

“Rare and endangered species dwelling in the karst cave systems, such as the Quatsino Cave Amphipod (Stygobromus quatsinensis), are completely dependent on dissolved nutrients transported by the water.” [Charly Caproff, for Sierra Club BC.]

-

A “karst spring” - this subterranean flow reemerges from a karst channel to join the Walbran River. [Source: Sierra Club BC and Charly Caproff.]

-

Extensive karst cave systems on Vancouver Island act as subterranean microhabitat that feeds old-growth rainforest on the surface

Reid Robinson, known locally as “the Karst Man,” in a photo for an article by Rikki Ayers for Sierra Club BC. “He has spent the majority of his life working in the forestry and fisheries industries and it wasn’t until he began working in tourism that he realized the intrinsic beauty of karst and how it was severely threatened by forestry and other resource industries.”

-

Activist with supportive sign, Vancouver Island [Photo by Sierra Club BC.]

-

Some of the best reporting on recent karst research on Vancouver Island comes from Bruce Grierson, available here.