[alexjplant]

I can't stand Guitar Hero because it's nothing like playing a real guitar and I'm therefore no good at it. At least the Rock Band drums vaguely approximate playing a cheap e-kit and the vocal part has proper pitch detection... unfortunately a real guitar is hard to replicate with cheap plastic hardware. There's also the fact that memorizing a real song is easier than memorizing colored buttons because you can build a mental model of the song around your knowledge of music theory.

On the topic of complex games a la Factorio: I've been playing a lot of Age of Empires II with my friends lately and have come to enjoy it. I previously shied away from RTSes because I was terrified of the meta but I've gotten decent enough to consistently beat the CPU on Moderate. I have no shot of ever commanding an army of trebuchets and knights in real life so doing it on my ThinkPad via Proton is the next best thing :-D

[pinkmuffinere]

Omg aoe2 is so addictive! Some things you might enjoy:

- YouTuber “spirit of the law”

- watching some build order guides. Fast feudal and fast castle build orders are super useful

- watching commentated games of the Viper

[alexjplant]

Ha, I was watching a SOTL video earlier today to learn how to better plan my military build. I was a Fast Castle -> Boom adherent until a week or two ago because I kept getting got by the CPU rushing me during Feudal without having my defenses built... these days I basically do Dark Age the same every time then adjust my strategy based on the map, enemy civs, etc.