Of the ones I’ve read, Use of Weapons is probably the best. Player of Games is the one I like the most. Excession is okay. I’ve got Consider Phlebas in my to-read pile.
I’m kind of split on Bone Tomahawk.
That sounds painful.
I wouldn’t recommend Surface Detail as accessible, IMO its one of the least accessible, the others are fine though. Of particular interest to gamers should be The Player of Games.
From what I know of Bone Tomahawk, that’s the joke. :)
Both Use of Weapons and The Player of Games are excellent. But as other’s have said, the Culture novels are not really a series the way some other sci-fi is, he just reuses some foundational concepts but takes each book in completely different directions.
Anyway, my favourite of Banks’ science fiction is probably Feersum Endjinn. It isn’t a Culture novel and I know a lot of people hate it, but I think it’s landmark science fiction.
It looks like the last expansion was about a month between announcement and release, so we’re probably looking at March, rather than, you know, today so that I can enjoy it on a nice snowy day.
Yeah, I think sometime in the second half of March is pretty likely. Between this and the EU4 expansion they have cooking up (as well as Bretonnia getting added to Warhammer) I’m at high risk of squandering some beautiful Rocky Mountain springtime weather. I shall greet the inferno that is the summer sun as a pale, sickly, man-thing!
Anyone else fooling around with Star Trek New Horizons?
I only discovered this total conversion this morning, but so far it seems pretty nifty. You can’t create your own race, but there are 45(!) Trek races from which to choose, Trek-specific events and crises, a reworked tech tree (Trek tree?), and, in addition to the random map generator, sector-specific maps including the Milky Way.
I haven’t done much with my Vulcan campaign beyond setting it up and poking around a bit, but my first science vessel is captained by Stann!
Good 'ol Stanley.
Well that looks DEEEEEEElightful. Thanks for the tip.
Very nice, I will have to try it.
I’ve just gone through two event chains taken from both the original series and TNG. Nice.
Hey, who here wants to learn about Psionics and the Shroud?
I really like move towards differentiating Ethics more. By tying various Ascendancy paths to ethics, it’s really going to make that choice a lot more important and provide more customization/variety in how you approach each game.
It seems like they are hard at work adding more character to the game.
I hope they can work on the performance of the game. It chugs along too slowly on my machine. I mean I put it on the fastest speed on day one and never back off.
I’ve been playing this one pretty steadily since release and I had a lot of fun in my current game of xenophobic militarists. I after 160 hours with the game I’m still encountering new stuff. Last night I played through a mid-game event chain that genuinely creeped me out in the best way and the payoff was unexpected, rewarding, and appropriately creepy. I’ve never had a huge war but my guys currently dominate 1/5th of the galaxy and I’m next to an awakened empire and there are other big players on the other side of the galaxy. Can’t wait to see how this one plays out for me.
What’re some must-have mods? I’m trying to get back into the game. Is Leviathans worth it?
I’m pretty happy with what I read today. I definitely feel that they are moving in the right direction.