Gormongous

I'd say he's more the Piero de' Medici, but yeah.

The integration is good, but Steam Workshop has a filesize limit of fifty megs, which means that most of the best modders, who work on big TC projects like the Historical Immersion Project or CK2 Plus, don't bother to package and split their stuff so it works on the workshop. In the case of EU4, the biggest and best mod is MEIOU & Taxes, which is on there but uploaded almost at a week's delay. The only mod for Crusader Kings 2 that I see on there right now and that I know to be respected in the community is Crusader Kings Z, which is fun but mostly a goof.

I'm hoping, when the BBC Wolf Hall adaptation makes it to screen, we'll see Chris do the sort of deep dive that bleeds over into the podcast. It'll be the Wolf Hall book podcast we never had!

Paradox has said outright that they won't do China because it involves almost doubling the map and the engine can barely handle it as is, but then again those were the exact reasons they gave for not including India two years ago. I think they'll go with whatever makes the most high-profile DLC, in the end. People lose their mind when offered new start dates, new areas, and new religions to play. In contrast, for all the good Sons of Abraham did to the base Catholic game, it didn't get a quarter the press of The Old Gods or Rajas of India. My hope continues to be that they do a realm-management/event-pack DLC, maybe with fixes for factions, succession laws, and the Holy Roman Empire, but I'm pretty sure that won't happen, despite two years of fan petitions and Paradox's statements right around patch 2.0 that all future DLCs would focus on the "internal" game. I plan to buy Rajas of India because playing the game makes my geography of a given region rock solid, but otherwise...

Having actually listened to the episode now, I enjoyed the discussion of Free to Play as a historical document, but I think it's missing a distinction between accuracy and authenticity. A perfectly accurate movie about Dota 2 is just an hour or two of gameplay footage with no interviews or commentary, just like a perfectly accurate history book is a series of contemporary documents with no editing or argument. Most documentaries try to be as accurate as possible through straight narrative and light commentary, with maybe some brief and blurry reenactments thrown if the subject is not particularly well-documented, but I can easily imagine a documentary that privileges the authenticity of watching Dota 2 with full knowledge of the game, rather than the literal events of a given match, which are archived and discussed elsewhere anyway. In my opinion, authenticity of feeling and context is a goal not striven for enough in "serious" documentary works, to the point that I'm reminded of "objective" game reviews just a little. I feel like In the Name of the Rose and Marketa Lazarová are two of the most authentically medieval movies I've ever seen, and they're both entirely fictitious, to the extreme. Anyway, I have not seen the movie, but it sounds like it errs more towards authenticity, maybe moreso than Chris and Jake are comfortable with. That's okay, but I don't think it makes it a commercial or propaganda if it tries to capture more about The International than just the bare facts.

Hah! I was wondering how long you guys would stick to your "rational" episode numbering scheme. Looking forward next week to episode -21.3! ...And now I hear the grief and mourning. I feel bad, number the episodes however it makes you feel better.

Yeah, the performance of such aquisitions can also vary wildly based on how the purchasing company does (or does not) integrate them. Interviews with the Motorola team says that they were cordoned off from the rest of Google and had to request info and tech like a third-party company. Some lead said he knew the sale was coming about a year out. Really a shame, because I have a Moto X and it is a fantastic device, maybe the best piece of consumer electronics I have ever owned.

To wit, I adore the calliope cover of that song and wish all songs in all games were played by calliopes.

Honestly, sounds like a perfectly typical launch for CK2 DLC. And ugh. You better have some post about having crazy fun, Dewar, because otherwise you're confirming everything bad that I suspected from Rajas of India. Religions have some interesting features, but are ultimately shallow and bland, like every time Paradox has added a new religion or heresy to the game (except Norse, because Vikings are apparently worth the effort and Jews aren't). The sources are too scarce for much of the period, so there are a lot of ridiculous and unworkable starts (like when they added 867, which is full of bad guesswork and in-jokes like "House Aspergers"). The de jure setup is under-researched and poorly balanced, like every time Paradox adds more provinces to the map (West Africa is still a crazy broken mess, but the devs have stated on the forum that it works well enough not to receive any more attention). I feel like I'm swinging back to the policy I had with Paradox in 2009 and before: wait and see. Since they're on Steam now, I get the added bonus of sales, although it's been four months and Sons of Abraham still doesn't get included in the blanket CK2 sales, so maybe not. There are some great glitches and oversights this time around, though. EDIT: Aww, the image of a gay man getting pregnant by his lover doesn't work: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?764733-My-king-just-got-pregnant...

Yeah, I'm trying to shake off my little-boy-with-a-broken-toy feeling. Some parts of the game are just stunning and the game itself is great.

Well, I received my print-and-play commission of the 1979 Dune board game from this guy today and my feelings are... mixed. Some components (the unit counters, the cards) are shockingly beautiful, well-made and overall of high quality. Others (the board, the combat dials, the rulebook) are something I could have done given half an hour in our media lab. I'm looking for ways to improve the latter, with proper linchpins for the dials and a cloth-tape backing for the board, but all in all it's been a very qualified success for me.

This is also something I'd sincerely like to hear from you, Twig. I have a friend who's looking forward to playing Bioshock Infinite since he just got it after signing up for Playstation Plus, but he won't talk to me about it now because I don't have anything nice* to say, other than, "It reminds me of how great a sequel Bioshock 2 was." * There's also a separate conversation to be had about how negative opinions are intrinsically much less well-received than positive opinions, even in discourse between friends, but not here in a thread that's the exception to that rule.

I mostly read about FLAC in the context of anime discussions, from the same people who carp about 1080p x264 Hi444PP 10-bit @ CRF16. From what I've seen and heard, there's not much difference in the esotericism of both.

Deep down, every game that ever has been made and ever will be made is a cinematic first-person shooter with light role-playing elements. The progress of a given genre is how closely its latest game approximates this platonic ideal.

I wonder if it's an issue with the USB port, like it silently dropping to USB 1.0 from USB 2.0... It's possible, I used to have a computer with obsolete USB firmware that did that.

Yeah! The patch notes had some really nice stuff for vanilla CK2 too, especially the implementation of the CK2Plus mod's best feature, revolts that group all revolters under a temporary title, in order to make them fight like a single group. With that implemented, there's only one other CK2Plus feature I'm missing, which is Wiz's faction overhaul that made factions not short-term groupings for petty goals but power blocs based around mutual interests. There were the princely, court, republican, and church factions, each of which had a certain configuration of crown laws and title distributions that made them happy. It was really, really cool to come to the throne and reduce church taxes to please the church faction of archbishops and pious dukes, knowing that in a few years you could make them all individually happy enough to raise taxes back up. It was so cool and gave a given realm a great character, especially when a line of dukes was always in the court faction (read, the loyalists) and you began to love them for it. Sadly, Wiz got hired by Paradox and is now working on making EU4's military AI airtight, which is great and all but the people with whom he left the mod are such bickering idiots that you might as well just play vanilla.

It's got some really interesting things being done with character relationships and with the long-term implications of player decisions, but it's much weaker as a game, just because they clearly were making it on a shoestring budget and schedule. Lots of repeated areas, a heavily simplified gear/stat/skill system (although in some cases for the better, since the first game had a lot of strange give to it), and a rushed third act leading to a facile ending. That said, I enjoyed it immensely and would much rather replay it than the first Dragon Age, since it put me in mind of Alpha Protocol more than anything else in the genre, albeit nowhere near as ambitious.

Yeah, I don't know. Now I feel really bad getting all indignant about being called ignorant, because I'd be over the moon if any of my own students were invested in a given period enough to take me to task for sounding like a dudebro about history. Anyway, the Assassin's Creed games have always been all over the map, so I don't know if I or Alex or anyone else should really be that invested about their historicity at all. I get a special flush from having my dissertation subject, William the Old of Montferrat, be an assassination target in the first Assassin's Creed and it be hilariously inaccurate. In the game, William of Montferrat appears to be in his late thirties (the historical William was at least in his mid-seventies), tall, thin, dark-haired, mean (Acerbo Morena describes him as short, stocky, and good-natured, with white-blonde hair), a partisan of Richard the Lionheart (whom the historical William never met, being instead great uncle to Richard's hated rival, Philip Augustus), and a Templar (the historical William didn't give much to any military order, but when he did it was to the Hospitallers). Credit where credit's due, they get the colors on his tabard right, although the lion rampant is specious, and his haircut is the Lombard style, so they had someone doing historical research, just not very thoroughly. I imagine it went something like . Oh man, there's a "trivia" section to the Assassin's Creed wiki! I can't get enough of it. A man dies six months earlier in your game than in history? Unworkable. A man needs to be thirty-plus years younger than he actually was? Historically accurate. If I had a time machine, there'd be a lot of things for me to do, but one would be to buy and play Assassin's Creed IV right when it came out, so I'd have plenty of questions when we interviewed this early modern historian for a job here. I have never met anyone more knowledgeable or more enthusiastic about how people used to sail in ships. Her presentation was about a bunch of documents that show a French ship's navigators doing trig and log exercises with each other to improve their own abilities. She even plotted the coordinates they each calculated in Google Maps so you could see them competing and improving, it was the best. Is there anyone who's really into late eighteenth-century France, even via Les Mis or something? What do you hope to see? What do you know they'll get wrong?

Yeah, my bad, but it's a poor choice of words, not an excuse to insult my intelligence and youths. I am a professional historian and hence get very excited at the chance to see the historical moments I study turned into living, breathing worlds. I'm calling the chance to walk through a landscape upon which the face of Europe was changed "sweet", not the bodycount involving two thirds of Germany. If we can dial down the rhetoric a bit, I would enjoy a discussion of how superficial most historical treatments are in games and how few (King of Dragon Pass, maybe) really even make the effort to capture an appropriate mentality.

The hardest part of my job, as in the part I have to do almost every day and never feel like I do well, is explaining in my writing that I'm ignoring or discounting a given source because I think they're wrong and not just because they contradict my argument. EDIT: Spoilered for dorky historian stuff that maybe shouldn't be available on the internet until my article gets accepted...

Thirty Years War, not the Seven Years War. Although goddamn, that's also a sweet historical moment that we pass over in favor of Connor Ratonhnhaké:ton's (Mohawk for "boring dude") tree-climbing adventure.

I think it's one of the most straightforward and obviously interesting nations with which to start, since you get to focus on integrating Norway and Sweden and then on either colonizing the new world, grabbing bits from the Holy Roman Empire, or reducing Russia to second-rate status. But no, it's not easy. EU4 is a military game, so it's all about plentiful money and manpower, neither of which are to be found in Scandinavia until much later in the game. Spain for colonization or the Ottomans for military are my recommendations, if you feel like trying the game again after a break of at least a few months, which it does sound like you need.

I'll do this nice and easy for you. 1) It's not a brainless rebuttal to point out that you were using a Tu Quoque fallacy to discredit Zeus' participation in this thread via fallacy, bring up a month-old comment for which Zeus had already apologized. Interestingly, you double down on the Tu Quoque while attempting to argue that you aren't making one, so I'm guessing you didn't even read the link I posted. 2) I don't see how people asking you to stop being an asshole to everyone is "smarm". In the Gawker article, smarm is an effort to seize the moral high ground of a conversation by focusing discussion on the presentation of an idea while discouraging discussion of its content. People here are taking issue with your tone because it's actually preventing them from engaging with the content of your ideas, thereby inhibiting discussion. Commenting to that effect is not shitposting. Shitposting is coming into a thread on games writing and posting a long, contradictory, and sometimes incoherent manifesto about how all games writing is terrible. Clearly you have nothing to add, besides smearing people who like something you don't, so why are you even here? 3) You're officially on my block list now, joining only one other person there in two years of posting. It's unfortunate, because you have interesting comments to add to some discussions, but your attitude is toxic and you are unable to admit being wrong in anything, so it's all for naught in my book. Maybe learn to chill out and treat your fellow forum members as real people with legitimate opinions and we can talk again someday. Christ, forget my reasonable appeal. You are awful. How the fuck did you become the arbiter of who gets to contribute what on this forum and whether it is useful? I don't feel bad about putting you on my block list anymore. I'm sure you'll find some way to mock me for it, anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque Can we move on now? This used to be an interesting thread before people started shitting in it.

That sucks hard. It's funny, Crusader Kings II is so easy to learn when you're small, but the rest of Paradox's grand strategy become more manageable the bigger the country. Spain is usually the best starter country in EU4 and Brazil or France in Victoria 2. You probably picked one of the hardest starts as a mid-ranked power with desirable land, but why am I trying to talk you out of it? I quit the game a few months ago myself.