Video game lessons learned the hard way

Start playing multiplayer whenever you want. If the only option is going into some competition of some sort, go ahead. Never as good of a day as today.

Dragon Quest V: When you hit the endgame grindy part, it may be tempting to buy all the shiny new items in the last town, but you should still save some gold in case you die so you can afford to resurrect dead party members.

edited 16th Jan '18 1:59:18 PM by lalalei2001

Pokemon Ultra Moon

• You can Wonder Trade the gift Totem Pokemon. I got Totem Mimikyu from this. I assume not all Totems can be traded like the ones exclusive to USUM.

Dragon Quest V: Scratch that last addendum, your character knows Zing so unless you're really unlucky you can resurrect party members with no gold cost and save it up.

From Fire Emblem Warriors: when playing History Mode, sometimes a stage might get a surprise visitor after you beat the boss initially presented as the end goal. This might be a doozy if you're going for S-Rank, especially if you're getting close to the time limit needed for S-Rank.

Earth 2140

• Never try to engage powered Heavy Defense Towers without heavy rocket units and enough room for more than one unit to get into range at a time. You'll get your ass kicked. Cut the power first and/or bring up the artillery instead.
• That said, Heavy Defense Towers are rather fragile. Do not expect them to hold out for long if the enemy is shooting at the tower instead of something else. Now if you throw down a Pillbox directly in front of them, on the other hand...
• UCS bombers kill Heavy Defense Towers very quickly, but their course is locked while on a bombing run and cannot adjust if the target moves out of the way in the meantime. That said, as air units they are still a pain to kill because unlike the sequel, 2140's rockets do not track moving air targets reliably.
• In general, stay the hell away from cliff passes and chokepoints that only let 1 or 2 units through at a time. The game's pathfinding can't deal with that kind of thing and will result in your units getting picked off one by one.
• ED laser tanks are utter crap. They're fine for killing small groups and buildings, but against larger armies, they get picked off before they even get into range.
• Do not leave your base undefended, even if you've got the enemy base on the ropes. Chances are the mission is scripted to counterattack your base with off-map units while you're busy whacking theirs.
• When it comes to Mines, go for quantity over quality.

Yeesh, why are you even playing that game? Earth 2150 is the one that everybody remembers fondly, not 2140!

Well... may as well bring up some old lessons I learned while playing 2150's campaign, and by extent the skirmish mode.

IN GENERAL:

• The base game had no option for teams. It was either a free-for-all, or every single AI faction trying to kill you.
• Oh, and while the repair units do have the cool little function to re-color your units and capture disabled enemy vehicles, the AI isn't going to fall for it. Younger me wasn't wise enough to realize that the AI doesn't even notice such things, or more ironically, even "intelligent" enough to fall for any sort of trap.
• Furthermore, there's no point in capturing enemy structures. It's too time-consuming of a process, you'll need to completely disable the structure first (when simply destroying it is the quicker and more efficient option), and most importantly of all, it won't even give you access to the enemy's tech. At best, you'll be able to use their factories to produce your own units, but that's it. Oh, and if it's a Lunar Corp factory? Hope you captured some solar arrays and batteries too, because their structures don't use the power network like the ED or UCS do!

EURASIAN DYNASTY:

• The ED Ion cannons are basically worthless. Only thing they're good at is disabling targets or quickly destroying shields. That's it. Handy, I suppose, in the original build of the game, where the LC had crazy-strong shields, but you were probably better off sticking to the ED's rockets and cannons anyways, since LC vehicles had less armor and HP than their counterparts.
• Heck, why even bother using energy weapons as the ED? It's not like shields had the capability to weaken kinetic weapon attacks anyways, and both the cannons and rockets are great all-around weapons.

UNITED CIVILIZED STATES:

• The plasma cannons start out weak, but get crazy-strong once you gain access to their heavy versions and the proper chassis to mount them. Good enough to the point that a Jaguar mech loaded with nothing but plasma cannons will tear through virtually anything, even heavily shielded and armored targets. Helps too that Plasma ignores armor values, meaning that ED tanks are losing a major edge. Best of all, you don't need to reload! Pity that younger me kept using nothing but the grenade launchers and rocket launchers, and for the longest time ignored the Plasma cannons as worthless junk.
• Oh, but do remember: the UCS didn't gain Plasma AA cannons until the Moon Project expansion. Which means you're a sitting duck against enemy gunships and bombers.
  • And furthermore, said Plasma AA had awful AI tracking, meaning that it could easily miss shot after shot if a target was moving in a diagonal direction!
    • One neat little tidbit though: they apparently made the armor piercing and DPS for AA Plasma really, really high in order to compensate for that flaw, which meant that it could tear through heavy bomber units and their shields easily. But even better, if you were clever enough with your positioning, it was possible to "angle" the AA turrets to fire at ground targets by duping it with a nearby airborne target, despite technically not having the function to do, and boy howdy, could they damage the crap outta enemy structures!
    • BUUUUT... remember, the AI for Earth 2150 sucked. This meant that, in practice, you'd probably learn the hard way about that trick after the Plasma AA accidentally blew away one of your own defensive towers or base structures, typically the power stations and their cooling towers. Which, in turn, would lower your power levels and disable your base defenses. Not fun.

LUNAR CORPORATION:

• Buildings that are being air-dropped have virtually little to no health and armor. Even the weakest of the rocket models can shoot them out of the sky.
• Remember that glitch I mentioned about the AA having poor aim and firing judgement? Well guess what, the LC fires AA rockets, and if they lose track of a target, be ready for them to start flying around wildly, and occasionally hit your own units and buildings!
• The LC was significantly re-balanced in the Moon Project expansion, enough to the point where the only true differences between the factions and their units were cosmetic and equipment-based. Case in point: they went from having discouragingly strong energy shields, to the exact same value that both the ED and UCS had. Furthermore, their heavy chassis now also had the same HP, same amount of armor, and roughly the same cost: the only stat differences remaining were how they could hover over the water and landmines, and moved just slightly faster than the other factions. A pretty sweet deal, in retrospect, since the UCS was seriously lacking in amphibious units.
• The Fat Girl unit was probably intended to be the counter-part to the ED and UCS's frigate warships, only lacking the amount of HP and armor possesed by those, nor the long-range naval guns. But in practice it was a far better deal, because again, everything in the LC faction consists of hovertanks.

Because I recently picked up the whole series on Steam during a 70% discount and seeing that 2140 was the only one I've never played, I decided to give it a try. Opinion is generally positive so far, though I have gripes with the pathfinding, the very narrow passages on some maps, how fragile defensive structures are and how utterly effing useless the ED's supposed ultimate ground vehicle is. If you haven't played the game, it's basically a Kruszchev with a heavy laser and a rocket launcher. Rocket launcher's decent, but the laser cannon sucks ass: packs one hell of a punch (unlike 2150, lasers inflict actual damage here and can kill structures very quickly), but slow-firing and very short-ranged. Tough armor, but not tough enough: one-on-one versus a UCS plasma cannon, the plasma will win.

Nuh uh. You have very limited cash for most of the Moon Project ED campaign, especially for research. Spending your early research cash on ion cannons and using them in the early missions to zap, capture and recycle enemy units to funnel the resulting extra credits into research can be a godsend, considering that you're always outnumbered and outgunned in this campaign.

Even in Lost Souls, the enemy doesn't always protect their power plants with radars or even Repairers, so Stealth tanks with ion cannons going after the power plants can knock out entire defensive lines with minimal casualties (mostly to minefields and enemy units that randomly cheat-autotarget cloaked units that keep hurting the structures). I abused the shit out of this tactic in the early ED missions.

Because if the LC use their Weather Control Center to make wind and/or you're playing in the map mode that randomly throws down weather effects onto the map every once in a while, those snazzy cannons become sitting ducks because with the wind keeping your Boyars from taking off after landing at a Supply Depot, you cannot resupply them with ammo. Nor can you resupply your rockets. There's an entire ED map revolving around this in the Moon Project. As well as multiple ED maps revolving around underground combat, which also keeps you from resupplying. So the only way for you to survive is to load up on lasers and go Jesus Yamato on their asses. They have shields? More lasers. Or Heavy Ion Cannons.

And SHADOW generators to slot into the fully-upgraded Heavy Plasma Cannon's sub-hardpoint. Against the LC, that's borderline Game-Breaker because the only stealth detection they have is the Phobos and since the plasma cannon has unlimited ammo, your Condors won't get shot down trying to resupply them at night with their lights on. Pack on an AA plasma if you're using a Jaguar and not even having a Phobos will help. Fun if said Jaguar is yours, NOT FUN if you're on the receiving end (and if you're in the LC or UCS campaigns of Lost Souls, you will be).

edited 25th Jan '18 9:16:40 AM by amitakartok

Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask:

As you progress through the game, expect the puzzles' difficulty to rise, and some of them will even border on Insane Troll Logic. For example, there's a rather shitty one where you have to figure out how many blocks a man has to lift at minimum from a pile of 10 to separate the light blocks from the leavy ones. You're not told at all how many blocks of each weight are in the pile, so the concept of a "minimum number of lifts" becomes impossible to execute on its own. So what's the answer? Just lift all 10 of them, of course. It doesn't help that the "hints" you unlock by spending your valuable Hint Coins are not only unhelpful, but they actually complicate the problem further.

And this one puzzle comes shortly after a very clever puzzle about a scoreboard of a girls' tennis league, which only disappointed me further as I thought mistakenly that all following puzzles would be better (right now I'm at the start of Chapter 5).

Did the Shadow generators even work against the AI? Because no matter what I did, they never worked as advertised.

Only time I recall them working was after I had made several UCS mechs equipped with Shadow generators walk into a powered-down enemy base in the skirmish mode, but that went to crap the moment they opened fire on a structure. The rest of the time, the game either followed my stealth units around, guns pointed, but not firing, or just simply immediately opening fire.

It works on the AI just fine, but if you keep hitting the AI with invisible units too much, its units randomly open fire on the aggressors despite not actually seeing anyone. In the Lost Souls ED campaign, I saw it numerous times: I was blowing up power plant after power plant with laser-armed Stealth tanks when suddenly the AI's most recent unit injection blew away one of them before continuing to my base. The buildings never reacted, only the units.

If your Shadows are getting fired upon on sight, the AI has a radar (usually a Spider tucked away between buildings; it's not armed, so it won't charge you on sight and consequently you likely fail to notice that there's someone standing there) or Screamer nearby. That or you're attacking at night and forgot to turn off the lights.

And if the AI indeed attacks the moment you open fire, all the better because it means they weren't attacking while your units were still closing in. Instead of them picking you off one by one, you get the first shot off by way of an alpha strike in the face at zero range.

edited 25th Jan '18 5:20:17 PM by amitakartok

Huh. Ain't that the weirdest thing... I never had such success with the Shadow generators and maintaining stealth. And yes, I was aware that you need to keep your lights off while using it, or else the stealth effect gets nullified. Like I said, the AI was uncannily good at zeroing in on my cloaked units. And I know for sure that it wasn't their stealth detectors either (unless their range was far greater than I ever realized).

I suspect the source of my troubles was the fact that the game AI technically knows where you are at all times, even when it can't see you. This is most obvious when the AI units start following your cloaked units around, even parking right next to them, and on brief occasions, even momentarily pointing their guns at you before "remembering" that it's not supposed to see you. And once you fire off a shot, it immediately begins attacking you.

Kerbal Space Program, AKA the game with the terrible tutorials.

• TURN OFF THE GODDAMN SAS DURING THE FINAL APPROACH OF THE MUN LANDING. It tends to make the ship do a 180° flip when less than 20 meters off the ground.
• Unless you're a masochist, don't even think about trying to do your first docking without SAS. Seriously, I spent TWO HOURS dancing less than twenty meters in front of the other ship because the RCS kept overshooting and being inconsistent about which button press thrusts in which direction (not to mention that whoever made the tutorials didn't heed his own advice and mounted the RCS off-center, causing the ship to tumble out of control the instant I tried to RCS without SAS on), but docked in less than five minutes once I figured out that locking the SAS to the other ship's docking port makes this shit a whole lot easier by way of allowing me to use the other ship as a stationary point of reference.
• I know it makes the engine's physics calculations easier, but fuck sideways whoever decided that asteroids do not get gravity wells! The docking tutorial was hard enough, but at least THAT target orbit was mostly circular. But a highly eccentric intercept near the periapsis WITHOUT gravity capture ?! Fuck you too.

....A part of me wants to make some clever pun about how Warhammer's Battlefleet Gothic ties into Kerbal Space Program. But alas, my humor instinct isn't up to the task.

Yeah, I meant to post on the Battlefleet Gothic 2 thread.

edited 26th Jan '18 5:37:25 PM by SgtRicko

...what? Did you post in the wrong thread?

Kerbal Space Program reminds me of Dwarf Fortress in that they're less micromanaging and more micro molecule managing.

Well, I only fired it up yesterday to check whether my new laptop can run it (my previous one ran it at single-digit FPS on the launch pad) and it can, just fine. So, I'm guessing I might get that Project Argus thing rolling after all... though I don't think this is the proper thread for that. Is there a KSP thread?

Kerbal Space Program is one of those games that I start playing every year or so because the concept is truly awesome, but put down after a day or two because I just don't have the attention span for rocket science.

edited 27th Jan '18 9:54:44 AM by Kayeka

And after having spent nearly my whole evening building my first rockets in sandbox mode, some more thoughts to take away:

• Forget about trying to build a spaceplane as your very first KSP project. Ain't gonna happen.
• Similarly, do not even look at Mk2 and 3 parts until you've built and successfully launched (and brought back down in one piece) a few dozen small rockets first.
• If your rocket keeps flipping upside down a few seconds after launch regardless of SAS despite the center of mass being the first stage, check all fins. Putting them slightly elsewhere will help.
• If the Mk3 engine on your first stage is visibly flailing around when the rocket flips, it's because mounting it to a small fuel tank is nowhere near structurally stable enough. I know what you're thinking, "but that rocket is attached to the other six tanks on the first stage too, it should hold"; it's not attached. Just because those six tanks are attached to their second-stage counterparts, which is attached to the second-stage central tank, which is attached to the first-stage central tank, the first-stage tanks are NOT attached to each other because the game's engine doesn't support multiple attachments. That's what struts are for.
• If you're using a Stayputnik and the rocket doesn't respond to any steering, you forgot to pack a reaction wheel. Stayputniks don't have one. That said, keep in mind that a reaction wheel will burn through a Stayputnik's battery in seconds, so pack one of those too.
• If the above rocket still doesn't respond, check your fins. It's kinda hard to fly something with no control surfaces...
• If all you're trying to do is achieve Kerbin orbit but your three-stage rocket keeps reaching orbit halfway through the second stage and escape velocity at the end of said second-stage... you're probably packing too many engines on the first stage. The smallest pod does not require five engines. Or a middle stage, for that matter.
• If you decide to mount an escape tower onto the command pod but end up not needing it, drop it as soon as feasible (preferably during first stage separation; if your rocket is going to explode, it already would've by that point). If your rocket is small, that sucker is heavy enough to possibly prevent your final stage from reaching orbit if you drag it all the way up there.
• If you don't know what you're doing, don't do like Scott Manley and burn continuously until orbit because his designs are far better optimized than yours. Burn until your apogee is at orbital altitude then cut the engines, wait until you hit apogee, then continue burning. Fail to do that and all you'll achieve is an extremely eccentric suborbital trajectory (and possible death by near escape velocity reentry) you don't have the gas for to stabilize.

edited 27th Jan '18 5:15:12 PM by amitakartok

Xenoblade Chronicles 2

• Be aware of your surroundings, especially where cliffs are concerned- they turn any Blowdown-attribute attacks into OHKOs at the best of times and can completely lock a teammate out of a fight at the worst of them.
• Dark-element Blades are kind of common, but for Blade Combos they need either another Dark-element Blade or the sole (at least, as of where I am now in mid-Chapter 6) Light-element Blade in the team somewhere. Don't think you can just fit them in by themselves for the sake of elemental diversity!
• Normal monsters will ignore you if you're a way higher level than them. Unique monsters do not care for this distinction.
• Don't neglect your Blades' affinity charts! Going back to three areas ago just to grind five of an enemy you ignored during your first trip, all for one skill, is a bit of a momentum killer when it comes to story.

EDIT: Chain attack edition!

• Once you get, like, four orbs on one enemy; DO NOT WAIT TO POP OFF A CHAIN ATTACK. Especially for Uniques closer to your own level, it's likely that they'll start to do crazy stuff after a point and you'll never get the opportunity to Chain Attack because you're expending all your gauge on reviving teammates.
• It's always better to use three attacks that don't have an elemental advantage on any of the orbs than it is to use one elementally-booned attack and two normal ones; since attacks will always prioritize the orb they have an advantage against if any- bad element management will rob you of the chance to extend a chain attack!

edited 16th Feb '18 2:23:38 PM by NesClassic

The Longest Five Minutes: You can double jump in the Haunted Run game.

Darkest Dungeon: Never, ever, EVER drop keys to make room in your inventory. Even if there's just one room left in the dungeon and you think there's no way a secret room will show up, just suck it up and keep them.

Edit: Addendum. The Occultist's heal is NOT to be relied on. It will always heal for 0 right when you really need it not to.

edited 27th Feb '18 9:31:57 PM by SilentPartner

Xenoblade Chronicles 2

• Disregard my above advice regarding the exploitation of Chain Attack orbs; if your team is incapable of guaranteeing at least one orb's destruction per pass then you're not playing the game right.
• You take more damage when you're attacked out of battle than you do trying to stand your ground and fight.
• Spike damage is still a thing, and like the first game the only way to find out if an enemy has it is to ram headfirst into them!
• Different Seals are applied based on what element the Blade Combo's ender is. One of these enders applies the effect "Seal Blowdown", which means enemies can't launch you into the air and send you flying back over a ledge any more. Guess which combo ender you should of been using when fighting near cliffs this entire game?

Adding on to the spike damage thing, some unique enemies will actually gain spike damage once they become enraged.

I think this lesson is a good cross between this thread and Dumb Things You Did As A Kid thread; I made magic grinding unnecessarily tedious in Secret of Mana.

When playing this game as a kid, whenever I got a new mana spirit + seed, I would stop what I was doing in the story and grind out the spirits until they were max level for their point of the story (thankfully, I didn't understand how level 9 spells worked at the time). When playing the remake, I made it a point to not do this*. I would grind out my magic as I went through the story. By the end, my spirits were averaging around level 6 which is plenty strong for end game.

Also learned that the characters regain their MP for every level up. Never knew about this as a kid since I always saved my magic for bosses.

-* The only grinding I did go out of my way for was Primm's Dryad because, seriously, when will I need those spells?