Ulzgoroth

Net Gain: cyberpunk corporate espionage strategy game. ...I've wanted someone to make that for a long time. Maybe not exactly like this, but this looks pretty good.

Probably rather less a clone than Terror From The Deep was...but a lot more of one than XCOM, for sure.

Maia looks pretty exciting to me. A 'god game' of space colonization? Yes please.

Heavies can be of mixed value...bullet storm and holo targetting either way can be really good, but even with a scope accuracy sometimes hurts. Though Bullet Storm is a real lifesaver when you find yourself closely engaged by more aliens than you have troopers... However, they have almost all the best abilities for taking out big tough enemies. HEAT ammo and shredder rocket (and bullet storm or holo target) are all great against sectopods, where you desperately need to do vast amounts of damage very fast. (The one major mech-killer they don't offer is Disabling Shot of course.) I've heard about people throwing around rockets to strip cover from aliens for easy killing, particularly with the help of an In The Zone sniper. I tend not to do that and to reserve my rockets as panic buttons and for big damage on big enemies, which of course means I take a lot of rockets home with me unfired.

The demo is pretty much a tutorial, and a partial one at that. It doesn't look like it includes anything you won't see in the very beginning of an actual playthrough. People have found spoilers in it, but they had to dig into the data files to do that.

GoG.com's latest release is Silent Storm Gold Edition. I'm not aware of it being on sale as digital download before this. This'll be my first chance to play it.

As a side note, based on the statement that it was a background image I figured out how to find the filename in the page source (it's in the first line with 'background' in it), and the names seem to be indicative.

Anything that would make the source identifiable would be good by me. Hover text, link, whatever.

Is there any way to tell what games the assorted header images relate to? I can place most of them, but there are a few I don't recognize and want to find out about.

The thing about the small squad sizes is troubling, I think. I never played X-com in the mass human sacrifice style, but the fact that you could and not infrequently would lose some people on missions was important. With a tiny team, costly victory becomes much less plausible.

Release SotS 1, or Argos Naval Yard SotS 1? Because release SotS 1 was good, but not nearly as high an aimpoint.

Unless they've completely re-invented it since I played it, it is much more a space/naval styled DOTA type game than a general strategy game. It was pretty fun, though at the time the player pool was very very small which made matchmaking a problem. I should look into it again. There are nebulae that have effects (particularly, stealth), asteroid fields that cause damage, and stuff that will kill you if you run into it.

It helps put the AI in a peaceable mood, I think (but no guarantees they'll actually make peace!), and keeps your ships from picking fights at un-occupied planets while allowing them at colonies. It's not so good for expanding peacefully since enemy ships over your new colonies will result in a fight, but it can reduce the violence of scouting. None of the treaties are 'hard', though. The AI can rapidly switch in and out of them, just like any player. Don't assume they'll hold to the treaty indefinitely just because they signed it. Don't let the Hivers gate your worlds just because you're currently at peace! There's also an issue where the AI winds up on the edge between preferred diplomatic states and flips back and forth, resulting in rapid-fire make/break alliances.

The initial release has somehow managed to disseminate a significantly incomplete beta version rather than the version that was intended. This is supposed to be being fixed, but anyone playing at the moment should be aware that what they've got was never meant for public consumption.

I don't know for sure, but my speculation is that it's a very simple consequence of the drive to only have one distributed version. From one Mecron post, I extract that they tried to work a way to distribute through various different channels without having any variation between them. And couldn't get it to fly. So to have only one version, they'd have to go through only one distributor. And, since they intend to make money, that one has got to be Steam. Steam isn't likely to go for selling a game that you have to download through someone else. And they're by far the most important digital storefront, so when it comes down to it you'll give every other distributor a problem (which they already tolerate with some titles anyway) rather than drop Steam.

With the Orange Box I'd say there's no hope of that working. Those are Valve games, and there's no surprise that they use Steam as DRM. I just tried firing up a bunch of my Steam games from their executables with Steam off. Many I tried immediately started trying to raise Steam, or failed because they couldn't raise Steam. Not surprising. Notable exceptions were X-com, AI War: Fleet Command, Frozen Synapse, and Breath of Death, all of which launched without a hiccup. Probably those would work on a computer without Steam installed, though I don't have one at hand to check. So a Steam game that doesn't require Steam to launch seems to have precedent, at least.

There's certainly no technical reason it would have to be impossible, though some games bought though Steam certainly won't work that way due to using Steamworks as DRM. In the thread it was said that this isn't uncommon in indie games. I've got no information about that myself. I'm not willing to uninstall Steam from any of my computers, but I can do some less extreme tests tonight and see if, say, my Steam copy of X-com can be started without Steam running.

The current claims from Mecron seem to be to the contrary. He's been saying that the apparently-Steam distribution channel is used only for installation and updating, not to run the game. A bit like how Impulse seems to work. If this is true, you should be able to only run Steam when you actually need to download something. Actually uninstalling Steam between updates theoretically should be possible but might be painful to deal with. Of course none of that will be proven until non-NDA'd people have installs of the game to fiddle with. I'll be happy to do some tests (I've got over 200 entries in my Steam library, so this doesn't scare me off), though I'm not going to be uninstalling Steam from my SotS ][ capable machine. EDIT: The Mecron story on how this happened seems to be that this is Kerberos' way of not having to deal with not-quite-identical versions from various distributors. I couldn't say why there isn't a better way to do that.