VelvetVexation: forum

Lesson learned: Deer are jerks and I should totally shoot them in the butthole in the future.

At least he didn't want to be your slave, right?

It's that thing British people say to the governor.

I'd have a stroke if my kid turned out to be some kind of toxic sociopath on the internet, too.

Just digging more graves, don't mind me...

What a nerd.

They're worse than millennial goths working in retail.

The f**king worst.

What's an SSL player?

Gotta appreciate his gumption, though.

So, for those of us not in the discord circle jerk, did something happen? Noticed the next round is delayed about a week, now.

The game really needs its own forums, or at least it's own subforum.

The only reasonable response to racism is exile... to Detroit.

I hear Axis just got f**ked so hard their farts sound like labored breathing a new round is starting in a day or so!

Come join the fun!

I thought we were going for some weird hentai angle shit at the start, and then it all went stupidly sideways.

Discussing his portfolio with his harem of very confused and disappointed lovers.

Wish Ched would stop with these self-inserts already.

Voted for Alexiush -- normally I don't like my art that busy, but that piece really worked for me.

I read CRLF as "Crelf", like he was a crappy elf or something.

Good issue!

Choose the WORLD tab and when (if) it loads, you should see in the upper right corner: NEWS, MAP and COUNTRIES.

Tap MAP and wait about 20-60 seconds and it should open a world map. You can zoom in and out like you would with Google Maps or other, similar map apps. Choose a nation to invade, tap TRAVEL and follow the promps per usual -- assuming it f**king works. As with anything related to Ched, it occasionally shits the bed and you need to try again, but it does work.

tl;dr: its fun. broken as shit, but fun.

So, I recently played my first round from start to finish and I figured I'd leave a review, since you (really, really, really) can't trust the games regulars to be unbiased.

So, technically? The game runs like a dumpster fire on my rather high end laptop and requires frequent refreshing in order to get past the page being stuck loading and other UI problems. My connection is pretty high end for Hawaii and I suppose above average for an American connection. Tried it on different browsers and it ran better on Chrome than on Firefox, but neither of them worked very well and I couldn't locate a solution beyond the semi-frequent refreshes.

The mobile version is so horrendous its criminal, and lacks even basic chat functionality. Navigation via map is obnoxious, round about and unnecessarily slow in loading even compared to the regular version. The lack of chat isn't a deal breaker, but missing intelligence reports super sucks in a tactical game requiring modest degrees of team work. The unnecessary extra navigational steps, stripped down functionality and missing options is pretty hard to excuse, though.

It's very early development (I hope?) and has the usual issues, with some units being exceptionally amazing and others not seeming to have a particular reason for even being there. A lot of the point unlock units are total garbage or incomplete, which is especially bad for new players who haven't bothered to read the less-than-fantastic wiki. If you need information, I highly recommend you ask using the in-game channels or if you're into discord, it's supposed to be better, though I don't really care for discord myself, so I can't confirm or deny that. Other people said it was pretty good, if you can deal with the cliques, so standard YMMV rules apply.

The game itself? Is actually pretty fun, once you get used to the rest of the bullshit above. I'd equate it closer to checkers than chess, though some of the long time players like to insist it's a rather deep and intelligent tactical war game. They're f**king nerds and it's mostly just checkers, though.

But I like checkers, so I liked Final Earth, for the most part.

The winning strategy seems to be having enough units someone can't annihilate your bait army and force you out, so you can dump your entire net worth into counter units that are pinpoint effective before they can attack again or flee the country. I didn't get that at first and was rather frustrated trying to find "good fights", but once you understand this, you're going to be able to counter even veteran players pretty easily.

They're going to tell you not to mix unit types, but this isn't entirely true -- you don't want to have infantry and tanks for example, but it's perfectly effective to have a force of one of the four major groups (foot, land, air, sea) and still have spy units on hand (special forces or drones) to better assess what you're up against. Not sure if it's just information they assume new players will intuitively know (I ran into tons of people with zero spy potential), or if they like having those little advantages, but once I realized I wasn't running a rainbow (mixed army of the four unit types) by having spy units, the game opened up a lot more, too.

Running solo is perfectly viable and you never really need to interact with anyone, but it's a lot more enjoyable having people to bullshit with and loosely coordinate with. You can create formations and such, like small squad of people who can be automatically coordinated by the leader to go do things, but I never got around to joining one. I don't feel like I missed much, either.

A lot of the veteran players who know / circle jerk each other have formations they team up with, or have multiple accounts they roll into a formation for easier management, but most of us new players just coordinated in the chat and bumbled around blowing shit up and that worked well enough.

On the subject of circle jerk: If you're new, understand this is a really, really, really niche game and it has a very, very, very small group of regulars who are, by my estimate, about neck deep up each others assholes at any given time and info swapping across team lines seems to be a thing. No rules against it as far as I know, but as I learned by blowing up some random nerd, your own team absolutely will turn against you if you blow up someones discord buddy, or otherwise get in the way of him farming awards, even if its before the game is over and there is still real fighting going on.

Really though, if you're reading this, you play Torn and you're used to dealing with shitheads, cheaters and people exploiting every inch of the system for every minor advantage, so this is probably just another day on the farm for you. Still, it's prominent enough I feel a new player should be aware of it before they commit to a month long round with an already potentially frustrating learning curve.

The game play itself is pretty linear and your stats (some of them) dictate in very minor ways how fast you progress, but almost everyone on my team ranked up within the same 24 hour period until well past rank 10 -- which iirc is when you get to reimburse your losses, or when losing fights stops having any meaningful consequences. Reimbursement is a very nice mechanic for new players, but eliminates any sense of loss for losing -- you just go home, get all your cash back and go try again.

Since travel takes a really long time, you'd have to be pretty incompetent to lose your entire net worth twice in one 24 hour period. I think I ended with a 0.3 k/d ratio and I never, ever wanted for cash to keep churning out troops doomed to die under my unfortunate command, so if you're someone who likes to talk shit and troll someone you just smashed? You're gonna be disappointed, because most people really, really, really don't care if you wipe out their army. It's a total non-issue.

It's nice for newbies and incompetents like me, but without any real risk, you eventually start just avoiding non-essential battles and stop bothering to capture or re-capture non-essential (read: anything that doesn't generate massive oil income) territories because of how hollow and pointless it is. I spent most of the latter half of the round roaming through eastern Europe and Asia wiping out enemy factories, since it has vastly, vastly more lasting impact than annihilating billions in enemy troops. A lot more time efficient, too.

The real reason I'll probably, if reluctantly, play another round, is the end game, where you need to start taking out enemy spawn nations. These tend to be heavily defended and actively protected by player efforts, so it becomes a real team vs team battle and how well people work together -- with and without direction -- makes or breaks whatever effort is being made to take one of these spawns, or defend them against being taken.

Our leader was reasonably active and gave basic directions and strategies, but wasn't annoyingly handsy about what individuals were doing. It worked pretty well and we very handily wiped out the other team -- so fast a lot of us didn't have time to even pursue awards or lose our most expensive end game armies in a suitably embarrassing / entertaining way, since we didn't get to finish fighting the enemies armies. The battle for spawns was definitely enjoyable and made up for some of the early to mid games disappointing monotony.

If you're expecting something revolutionary or even fully functional, forget Final Earth, you shouldn't even be playing Torn. If you can manage your expectations and are willing to spend some time learning the ropes though, it's a fun little time waster that really has it's moments. It has very low time investment requirements, too, since even if you aren't actively fighting / pushing for control, you can build infrastructure that has a real impact on how many tiny European nations we can collectively nuke out of existence before the end of the game. And fund our reimbursements and stuff. I guess.

If nothing else, if you like Torn, you'd probably like this, too. Probably.

I'd have a stroke if my kid turned out to be some kind of toxic sociopath on the internet, too.

It's silly to offer up DPs when most people will happily be rats for free.

I think it's nice LEX took him back, even though he's an unapologetic malcontent, plagiarizer and cheat.

Have a free bump, and maybe think about not cheating your ass off next time.

I wish more people would ask themselves this question, generally.

Lots of things are missing, broken, or half-done and appear abandoned.

You don't have to have been here for a dozen years to realize the game is effectively on life support with a tiny little drip feed of "adjustments" to ensure the money keeps coming in for as long as it can. When was the last real, meaningful, revitalizing change the game has had that got players legitimately excited? That players loved and gave it a "new game" feel for even a little while?

It'd be nice to have, but it's never gonna happen. I love to be wrong on this, but I doubt I am.

Never found a single useful thing. I've found enough morphine to kill every elephant on the planet, I guess. Is that useful?

Oh boy... here we go again.

Neo scavenger was a ton of fun. I used to waste a lot of office hours playing it on the sly, only to get wiped out by some crazy werewolf rng and rage quit for a week.

Not sure it would translate to torn, since torn has zero requirement for both parties to be online for any kind of pvp to happen. A lot of pvp happens in entirety different time zones between people who never speak or even acknowledge the pvp happened.

Two entirely different animals, really.

Now I want to go play neo...