Times you got yourself up a creek without a paddle in games

[StaceyPowers]

What are some of the worst situations you created for yourself in terms of making it hard to beat a game?

I picked literally the worst possible preconditions for a quest in Dragon Age 2 last night, and after an hour of repeating the same fight (and preceding dialogue) over and over again, I’d had enough. I went back to a prior save and put in different preconditions, and got through it with ease.

Not a terrible situation since I had that save, but might have been if I didn’t.

The worst ever mess I recall getting into was in Return to Zork on DOS back in the day. There was some seemingly minor item which I lost irrevocably through some stupid decision. I thought it didn’t matter, and continued playing. Later I found out I couldn’t beat the game without it. I had to start all over.

Thankfully, it seems like devs nowadays make it hard for us to strand ourselves. But what are some times you’ve screwed yourself in a game, whether recent or older?

[Executor Akamia]

Remember when I complained about the fake difficulty of Stellaris? Well, if you play on difficulties higher than Cadet, you really need to know how to become a strong empire fast, because every AI empire has bonuses to pretty much everything in the game. A benefit to this is that if you have allies, the odds of them having unrest rebellions is incredibly low, but when the game is rigged to have mostly hostile empires, that’s a relatively minor benefit, especially since they similarly have low odds of experiencing such rebellions under those conditions.

I am not yet particularly good at advancing quickly. I’m working on it, but it’s not easy by any stretch of the imagination. Even without the bump in difficulty, if you advance too slowly, you won’t be strong enough to defeat endgame crises or even midgame crises when/if they happen. That happened to me in my latest playthrough; I was playing a militaristic, fanatical materialist Human empire with mechanist and technocratic civics, and I was pursuing synthetic ascension (turn all my organic pops into sapient androids). Things were going okay for a few centuries, until the resident Holy Guardian Fallen Empire woke up, presumably via an Upstart trigger, and turned me and my tributary into their subordinate. I was making preparations to start a war of independence when an endgame crisis triggered, the Extradimensional Invaders, and spawned within my borders – honestly a first for me, as the crises usually spawn within someone else’s borders. I quickly rushed my fleets to try to shut down the invaders before they spread, but they were too powerful. I abandoned that save at that moment. It’s not even as simple as going back to an earlier save, because I was playing on ironman mode, which limits saves to a single autosave file that overwrites itself every few in-game months.

Edited April 22, 2019 by Executor Akamia