Gormongous

I haven't listened to the podcast yet, but I agree vehemently here. In fact, I feel like Creative Assembly didn't go far enough. As Macedon, I was able to field nine armies and six navies after uniting Greece and Asia Minor. I only had the money to field four of each, which was more than enough thanks to the passive AI, so it felt as though the limit didn't really matter past the first few turns of the game. I'm sure the AI issues that have plagued the series would keep them from ever doing this, but I'd like to see a Rome-type game where you only have two armies and have to ask yourself carefully about where to deploy each one every year. As it stands, with the power curve of Total War: Rome II being what it is, the question does get asked, but at the wrong time

Well, in RUSE, units beyond the fog of war were represented as either large or small tokens. Big tokens were probably tanks, but who knows whether they were cheap or expensive. Small tokens could be a vulnerable infantry unit or an anti-tank battery. There were cards that could swap the appearance of large and small tokens or that could generate ghost units of several preset mixtures. The main problem, which seems to be the main problem of most bluffing games at the high level, is that good players learn to recognize the circumstances where a bluff is expected and just play more carefully during those exact moments, without really altering the basic rhythms of that play. It was a fun idea, but not really sustainable. I was more thinking about my brief time playing Total War: Shogun 2 online. Often, I had to fake an incomplete knowledge of tactics or make an obvious mistake in order to tempt my opponent into charging past a copse of trees instead of scouting it. My last battle, where I purposefully botched a river crossing in order to make my opponent try their own, was so amazing for exactly those reasons that I never had the heart to ruin it by playing again. What does Sun-Tzu say? "All warfare is deception."

Did Fox always have way too many teeth, or is this a next-gen thing?

I wish! Nah, my first game as Burgundy was the one where I was getting seven hundred gold a turn and had a hundred thousand saved up by the end of the game. I conquered all of the Antwerp node and most of the Bordeaux, Genoa, Lübeck, and Frankfurt nodes, plus a fleet of three hundred light ships pulling most of the London node forward. I basically was reaping the profits of half of Europe (along with their colonial empires) at that point, since no one could compete with me in a node where I had all the provinces. It was pretty egregious.

I was just thinking! Also, different economic systems exist for nations, often trading efficiency for player control or vice versa.

Patience! You're playing the long game. Just make sure your daughter-in-law doesn't raise your grandson to be an idiot. Aww, who are we kidding? AI? Idiot? Your grandson's going to be a 2/3/1/1/4 Detached Priest. Nothing you can do about it now.

HRE is a pain in the ass even as a participant. Unlike the previous installment, Austria's never going to lose the imperial crown in Europa Universalis IV unless electors start converting or someone starts vassalizing them. So basically, you just watch the HRE consolidate down to ten or twelve states that are almost all Austria's besties, because they're the ones that are allowed to grow, and then suffer reform after reform. Escape while you can, I say! I did have religious ideas for this exact situation, but converting put me at -1 stability (since I never go to +3 anymore, thanks comets), then a dead ruler put me at -2. Between 25% religious unity (yeah, I tried to convert with only a quarter of my provinces Protestant), 14% overextension (a province I forgot to core), and crap legitimacy (from changing republic to monarchy by forming Italy), it was something like 311 admin points to bump stability back up to -1, which wouldn't even have stopped the rebels, so I didn't bother. I just waited until the Catholics captured a province (which took way too long), then converted back, with only the lost stability and prestige from the conversion and the surrender. It was a really rookie mistake, all in all.

Steam version updates automatically, although patches usually coincide with new DLC. Gamersgate I don't know, I think it's manual.

That sucks about the HRE provinces thing. Is it too difficult to just remove them from the empire? Trade power is increased by 20% each time it's forwarded, I think, which rewards long chains of trade nodes. You're only increasing your trade power in the end node by having a lot of trade buildings in the Seville node. Trade value increases the same way, so building a lot of manufactories in the Chesapeake Bay node would pay off a lot too. What you suggested looks peachy. EDIT: Aaaand just about five minutes after all this smug-seeming advice to give, I have a humiliating blowout in my Tuscany-to-Italy game. Mega-France had boxed me out of the cardinal game, so once I united the peninsula, I tried switching to Protestantism, in order to push ahead with ideas and tech. Bad idea. Kids, unless more than fifty percent of your provinces are Protestant, you'll just lose yourself three hundred admin points and fifty prestige banging your head up against that fact. Thankfully, I accepted the rebels' demands in time so that I only lost the island of Sicily and a couple Alpine provinces, all of which I was able to recoup by the stroke of 1600. I think I'm pulling out of the HRE in the next decade, since breaking Styria and the Netherlands off of Austria failed to lose it the imperial crown. I need to get at least some of these maluses off me. In a way, it sucks that the further you are from the HRE, the less chance you have of participating in the Reformation. But that's history. Luther's words ain't ever going to touch Italy, let alone Spain.

If there's a vassal you can release in the HRE, then sell it more HRE provinces, that might work. If you move your capital to Paris or something, you can get a four-node trade chain going on, which would be good. I don't have any other ideas. I never push my overextension that high, but it seems to be working for you.

You are King Robert's vassal before you are Duke Philip's ally. The only way the latter trumps the former is if you are called into the war by Philip (or declare war on your liege yourself). Presumably, since you're a one- or two-province count, he doesn't see fit to call you, which means your troops and money are supporting Robert the usurper. There might be an option in Philip's diplomacy menu to ask to join his war, but the circumstances of that option appearing feel inconsistent to me even after seven hundred hours. Also, if one of your holdings is occupied by someone who is at war with your liege but not technically with you, no. There's nothing you can do, besides nurse a grudge or declare war on your liege yourself. That's feudalism, I guess!

See, I have a lot of free time because I'm a graduate student (although not this year, fuck being a TA), but I feel like a workaholic because there is no clean break between work and play in grad school. I do all my dissertating on the same computer that plays video games, so I can never get away from the feeling that I should always be working, even when I've just done six hours of good work already. It's a very damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation.

After hearing Chris' mixed feelings about the last season of Breaking Bad, I'm a little distressed that I won't ever get to hear him spin out his thoughts in full, certainly not on the podcast.

Interesting. I'm always at max forcelimits, but I've never had a shortfall as bad as yours so late in the game. It must be a combination of factors (gold, inflation, overextension, no manufactories, no merchants)? If you could clean up the Antwerp trade node and then use your fleet to force everything there, you could easily be making three times your current income in trade. Although, I'm not sure more war is the answer (yes it is).

My first game was as Burgundy and my second as Vijayanagar, both huge land powers, so that's probably not the case. Like I said, I feel like there's just a certain point in the early eighteenth century where, if you've been keeping up with tech and are reasonably large, you're able to make at least three figures in trade income, which will end your financial concerns forever, because monarch points, which don't scale with size or tech, become the limiting factor on all major expenditures. Are you exceeding forcelimits? That's the only way the expense of your army is going to exceed your income by any reasonable amount.

Digging up this old, dead thread just to post the fake Kotaku review summary from Kirk Hamilton: Is anyone here planning to buy and/or play it?

After we finished watching this latest episode, one of my friends voiced how she really didn't like the ending. I feel like I can finally see how the show's going to end and it's actually a bit of a relief. I really couldn't for a while there.

I guess I think about it a different way. Especially with phalanx formations, it's so easy to massacre the AI with only ten-percent casualties on my side that I auto-resolve to both save time and put an extra brake on my progress. But seriously, what is it about pike phalanges? All you need are a couple of cavalry units to distract the AI from its original battle plan and then a couple of archer units behind your lines to make them decide to charge you. Nine times out of ten, they'll thrown themselves against the pikes and rout in under thirty seconds. It'd almost be boring if it weren't the most satisfying thirty seconds of the game.

When my friend invites me over to play his massive collection, I usually build and run a (fairly generic) Jinteki deck. I like the bluffing element of ICE, even though I know that there's better corporations for building strong engines or murdering runners.

I actually like the changes to auto-resolve. There's a good chance I wouldn't be playing the game right now if not for them, simply because siege battles are (still) awful (always have been, always will be) and they constitute most of the military game now. The ability to set the stance of the simulated AI in my auto-resolve means that I usually trust it to give me an adequate outcome, although it's very confusing when an "aggressive" stance saves you casualties or a "defensive" stance costs you them. I also like the army/navy stances, though the province edicts along the same lines are much less well-realized. The main problem (which is the problem of every Total War game thus far) is that the AI has no idea how to use them and so just uses "forced march" all the time, meaning that every army I fight in the field is at half morale and easy to beat. The AI in general is a lot worse at playing Rome II than earlier games. I don't think I've come across a single AI settlement that wasn't deep into the red in terms of happiness and income. Radious' mod, which is one of the first to come out for Rome II, relieves the food and squalor penalties across the board, which actually helps the AI more than the player, since the former can't game it like the player can. Stuff like that makes me wonder how much testing actually happened at CA.

I've been having a really complicated relationship with Total War: Rome II. The first night I played it, I wrote something in the Quitter's Club thread about how I was going to wait for a patch (or maybe even an expansion) to play more. Then I've kept playing it every single night, hating every moment of it. I suspect, like Napoleon: Total War, this'll be a game where I finish one campaign and then never play it again, although with Napoleon I was overwhelmed by the scale, rather than underwhelmed by the design. Here are a couple of comments I posted on Tom Chick's review of the game, one of two that dared to give it a failing grade: To finish the story from the second comment, I killed all eight armies and four navies, enslaving almost three thousand of my own people. The civil war then ended and, as a reward, the faction politics have been stripped out of the game completely. There are now no longer any valid interactions to be had on the faction screen, neither promotions nor marriages. It's very, very odd. Honestly, I think my enjoyment comes from my love of video games and my love of ancient history, both of which Rome II captures imperfectly. There are just so many boneheaded decisions present, like the battlefield capture points and the navy system, and I don't doubt there are even more hidden by the abysmal documentation that CA fanboys are mistaking for "complex gameplay." I'd really like to see Creative Assembly pull something out of this. It sounds like they were on an impossible timetable from SEGA and had to keep an eye on a future console port, so I don't know if it's possible, but I still hope. What factions have you played as, Hero?

The stock browser for Android 2.2, not Dolphin or Opera. I'm not sure what its proper name is.

I'm getting weird 400 errors for embedded videos on my mobile browser, but Chrome still works fine.