Gormongous

Hah, I didn't mean to make it sound like I'm some crazy stickler for facts. It's more that I felt Carlin's penchant for melodrama sometimes tempts him to play up certain elements (like catastrophe) over others (like continuity), which bothers me because it's a weakness I struggle with myself. I'll give the "Punic Nightmares" series a listen. If anything's going to allay my misgivings, it's Rome. Thanks, guys.

The various Terry Pratchett audio books are quite good, being of that sort of British writing style that almost sounds better spoken than read.

Is it worth it slogging through the Hardcore History archives? When I was on the lookout for easy ways to freshen up my knowledge before doctoral exams, I found myself really taken with his series on the fall of the Roman Republic, even if he was a bit too fond of making up analogies on the fly, but his four-hour discussion of the Dark Ages was insufferably bad, packed full of the misleading chestnuts that I spend most of my time with new students disabusing. I've been toying with giving his new episodes on the Mongols a listen, but I'd really like someone else's opinion on the quality of his research and presentation.

That's not entirely fair. A lot of gamification and achievement culture is designed from the ground up to tap into subconscious and compulsive responses that have nothing to do with the weakness or strength of a given individual. It's like saying that someone is weak for getting a TV jingle stuck in their heads.

I occasionally listen to Thomas Tallis or Michael Praetorius while playing Crusader Kings 2, which works better than the Hollywood-style medieval music Paradox produced, if only because it's more authentic. Philip Glass sounds great, but I'm not acquainted with modern classical music enough to recommend beyond that. When my friend and I used to duke it out on the original Unreal Tournament, he'd listen to DJ Tiesto and I'd listen to Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. Both have similar focusing effects, it seems. It's really funny how the right music can change the entire experience of an otherwise familiar game, actually. I've never had a more intense and fulfilling game of Civ IV than when I replaced the soundtrack with my Godspeed! You Black Emperor discography. I had a stress headache for days.

They tweaked this around 1.03 or so, because there were too many exploits that could be achieved by ganking a small power currently getting steamrolled by another war. It's not very authentic, I know.

Christ, man. Educate your own kids, keep them free of unsavory foreign influences.

Oh, speaking of garnering information in RTS games, I think my biggest gripe about Wargame: European Escalation compared to RUSE is exactly how they've built upon the scouting model. In RUSE, units have a line-of-sight circumference delineated by a white ring around a unit. The ring can be blocked or deformed by forests, buildings, or other terrain, but any unit within it will be revealed, unless it's infantry, which can hide in certain types of terrain and are only detectable there by special scouting units. Wargame complicates this unnecessarily by removing the ring and replacing it with a nebulous "optics" rating that goes from "bad" to "excellent". All units can hide now, based on their size and stealth ratings, which are anything but intuitive at first glance. Basically, it takes a well-abstracted system and dumps a massive amount of granularity into it in the name of theme. That's all well and good, but when it boils down to me parking a helicopter over a forested choke point while never being sure if its stats just aren't good enough to find anything... I don't know, I feel less like I'm fighting the enemy and more like I'm fighting the game. I feel like unnecessary detail added for atmosphere are behind a lot of the more bothersome implementations of espionage systems, especially ones with die rolls. Edit: Don't get me wrong, I love Wargame. I can't stop playing it. RUSE just did a few things better.

Reminds me of an interview I found with Miles Davis where he hates everything.

I'm probably going to have to reneg on the promise of more Saxon diaries, mostly because of an idiosyncrasy in the game's title system. Apparently, upon gaining a higher title, like that of emperor, all vassals not already under their de jure liege default their loyalty to the new title. What that means for me is that, if I get elected emperor, all the dukes I spent years wooing to the titular crown of Saxony become vassals of the Holy Roman Emperor again and are lost to me if my son doesn't inherit the whole kit-and-kaboodle. This has led to a somewhat hilarious and certainly gamey policy of being a raging asshole for no reason other than to keep me from getting elected against my will (yet never so much of a raging asshole as to cause rebellion among my dukes, since they're already touchy about being non-de jure vassals of a titular king). There's really nothing to report anyway, even though I've made it to 1171. The kingdom of Saxony now holds the entire northern half of Germany and I get to hand-pick each new emperor, since most of my vassals follow my lead. The biggest slip-up so far was marrying Magnus' great-grandson to his niece in a moment of distraction, but fortunately all their offspring died as inbred freaks. Fortunately? This game can be pretty fucked up sometimes.

Yeah, I just played a game of Civ IV and noticed the last power with a different religion on my continent responding really reactively to my troop movements along their border. It's a great step further along those lines to have the game put that into the limelight, especially if it's better than the blunt "I know what you're doing, stop planning an attack" messages that pop up in Gal Civ II. I do agree with the podcast crew though, that espionage works best in a game that has mechanics specifically designed to interact with it. Soren suggests an event system, and the plotting in Crusader Kings II is a good attempt along those lines.

Eh, authorial intent is overrated anyway.

The Breton chick popped out two sons when Magnus was just past sixty, which is suspicious, but beggars can't be choosers. I picked up Brandenburg to the west, Meissen to the southwest, and Thuringia to the south during the latest civil war, then had to endure a fifteen-year regency when Magnus died from wounds received in battle. His son Ernst is first in line for the imperial crown, which worries me because the Empire is in a terrible position right now, fighting four simultaneous wars of excommunication, and I'm not sure the kingdom of Saxony will benefit from one of its own on the throne right now. Twelfth-century problems, I guess. In vanilla, tyranny (for unlawful punitive acts) and dishonor (for failed plots and assassinations) are represented as opinion penalties, so if you just mouse over any vassal's opinion of you, you can read it there. I played as one of the Rurikovich dukes for a lark once. It's a nightmare, everyone's at war with everyone because they're all related and have claims on each other. Poland is pretty fun, though. You've got seniority succession and two of your brothers as dukes waiting in the wings. If you open a ruler's profile and then click on the rightmost of the three buttons in the upper right, you open the realm tree browser. Once there, you can mouse over a percentage that will tell you the theoretical and actual amounts of troops able to be fielded. Like brkl said, the five big powers (France, the Holy Roman Empire, Byzantium, the Fatimids, and the Seljuks) can all field around 25,000-30,000 men at the beginning. Of course, that number is elastic, since your vassals will give you less troops if they hate you and more if they like you. In my opinion, Meath is only going to get more powerful. You need to nip this in the bud, since you can't count on a civil war to do it for you. There are a few ways of going about this. You say you have a lot of piety. Can you excommunicate the doge of Meath? It'll make all his vassals hate him and prompt other powers to depose him, which will give you a chance to attack. Barring that, you could try to start a civil war by excommunicating as many of Meath's vassals as possible. The doge will probably try to imprison them, so worst-case scenario is that he has a bunch of vassals sitting in jail and giving him the minimum possible troops. As for mercs, I advise to save up and get a nice army. If you win a lot of battles, chances are you'll capture a lot of bishops, mayors, and barons, all of whom can be ransomed to pay for upkeep. If it doesn't feel too gamey to you, you can hire the mercs, park them on Meath's capital, and then declare war, since mercs don't count as raised troops. As long as you defeat their main army with the first clash, you have a month or so of free reign before the levies replenish. You can even dismiss the mercs after your initial victory, if money gets tight. Also, marry your sons and daughters to important people. If you can drag Brittany, Scotland, or even England into the war, they'll win it for you.

I'll always remember a massive fight I had with some students in a postcolonial lit course over America's supposedly cultural homogeneity, compared to India or China. Between the Northeast and the Deep South and the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, there's massive differences in American culture that approach the ethnic divides of many modern European states, but the melting-pot rhetoric is such a strong part of the discourse that people tend to see American culture as the negative space filling the gaps between older and more legitimate ethnic cultures.

Yeah, it's -30 in vanilla, but it's allegedly outweighed by the maluses that mayors never get. They never get ambitious (-50), resent increased crown laws (-30), or desire the kingdom they form part of (-20). They also never inherit each other or start wars over dynastic claims. So yeah, the -30 is a bit of a hump, but it's a much more stable realm once you surmount it. Anyway, I broke down and started the CK2+ Saxony game I'd been talking about, rather than make progress on the Bisson book I need read by the end of the week. Historically, the Billung dynasty of Saxony went extinct at the beginning of the twelfth century, with its two surviving daughters marrying into the infamous Welf dukes of Bavaria and the counts of Anhalt. I'm trying to do one better, but it's not easy. Here is the state of the world circa 1100 AD. William of Normandy died during his bid to take England, Burgundy broke away from the Holy Roman Empire during a revolt against Henry IV Salian, and the Komnenoi sat on the throne in Constantinople for not even a generation before civil war broke out again. In the north of Germany, the most powerful supporter of the now-humbled Salian emperors consolidates his power while their weakling Zähringer successor feathers his nest with pitiful raids along the Pommeranian coast. Let me tell you, it's been a wild ride, becoming king of Saxony From the start date, I had to hurriedly attack Meissen to keep them from claiming my one and only ducal title of Saxony. Marriage alliances forged by joining my sisters to Bohemia and Lower Lorraine, as well as my brother to Matilda of Tuscany, gave me the upper hand there. The ransoms I earned during that brief conflict included two counts, which gave me enough money to create another ducal title, Gelre to the west. I immediately attacked my ally Lower Lorraine, which had all its forces tied up besieging some rebellious vassal. High off those victories, I tried to foment a plot to revoke the county of Braunschweig from my vassal, the count of Friesland, but it failed like that kind of plot always does. Fortunately, three other counts rebelled along with him. Despite my callous backstab, Lower Lorraine still liked me enough to lend help quashing the revolt of half my realm. Once the offenders were in jail, I banished them all and took possession of their lands and money. The Holy Roman Empire was still hurting from the revolts in Burgundy and Italy, which my nephew had taken part in as the new duke of Tuscany, and hadn't raised its crown laws beyond "autonomous vassals", which meant that I couldn't revoke titles normally. Instead I got a whopping 60 tyranny, which in CK2+ is a permanent trait on a scale from 0-100 that gives you reduced revenues and troop morale as well as huge opinion hits. It was worth it. Even after the death of Ordulf, my starting character, in battle, his son Magnus had enough money to pay off the rest of his disgruntled vassals and still be within spitting distance of creating the titular kingship of Saxony, which is available in CK2+ to any duke holding at least two titles with a capital in Brunswick or Saxony. I even managed to weather my choice of the wrong side in a massive civil war that broke out in 1082, when Emperor Henry IV was excommunicated for being too fat and horny. I figured that staying loyal would net some of the traitors' titles and cash, but then only Bavaria and Brandenburg stuck it out with Saxony, so you can see our lands being ravaged by Holland and Lower Lorraine above. Once Henry IV met his death in battle and his infant son by an assassin's blade soon after, the imperial title devolved to a cadet branch of the Zähringen dynasty in Verona. I'd hoped to have the newly crowned Magnus I Billung of Saxony get elected to the throne before he died, but the wave of imprisonments and executions that followed his coronation has left him enormously unpopular with the other German princes. The few that remain of his own vassals still love him only because they all received dukedoms bought by the despoiling of their peers. Magnus only has a few years left in him, but I plan to bring Brandenburg and Thuringia under the control of his successor. Or not. Oh, that's right. The other German princes also probably hate Magnus because he had five girls and no boys. When he turned forty-five, I panicked, imprisoned his Hungarian wife, and executed her in order to marry some lustful hedonist Breton girl. She produced exactly zero children, but I managed to get the law changed to agnatic-cognatic anyway, so crisis averted. If his Italian cousins in Tuscany had inherited, I'd lose out to revolts either there or in the north, and I couldn't risk the kingdom coming apart after just one generation. The infamy of four banishments (20 tyranny each), one unlawful imprisonment (10 tyranny), and one execution (5 tyranny, oddly enough) weighed heavy on Magnus' mind, causing him to suffer from some mild episodes of dementia. The game tells me he talks to angels, which seems incongruous with a piety of 0.9. Anyway, his first daughter will inherit now. She's married matrilineally to the son of some German baron that I made duke of Saxony and has one daughter, which could prove problematic, seeing as her husband has decided on celibacy. My plans for expansion to the west and south might have to wait, but that's okay. I've never played a game as a good vassal and I'm looking forward to it, a little. I'll keep you guys posted if I play any more. I'll probably be less text-heavy when I do, too.

I know this is a big honking reach, because all of ten people have and play this game, but I bought Wargame: European Escalation during this most recent Steam sale and would love some people with whom to try comp stomps and friendly matches. I consider myself to have been pretty good at RUSE, invariable Pershing rushes aside, but I venture online with this game and get WTFBBQPWND in thirty seconds by assholes flying in anti-tank infantry under the cover of ten thousand Apaches. So yeah, if anyone here owns this game and is willing to swap a couple matches sometime to earn some stars off each other, my Steam handle is hallib@sbcglobal.net. I know a couple of the TMA guys played it back when it came out, did anyone bite then?

Well, I guarantee that there will be a tipping point eventually, because of how taxes work with different holdings. Duke-level republics take a percentage from count-level republic revenue, which takes a percentage of baron-level town and church revenue, meaning that they grow faster and more efficiently than their feudal counterparts, which usually only raise taxes from holdings in their own demesne. Again, an argument for vassal mayors, I guess.

I loved Y: The Last Man but totally flamed out on Ex Machina. It's long enough ago that I can't really remember why, though.

There are a few scattered all over the map, like Genoa and Venice, that exist at the game start. Towns are much wealthier than castles and free from most plots, so any independent town-based lordship is going to expand like wildfire. Watch, I'm psychic. In your current game, whoever you happen to be, Genoa holds the Balearics and much of southern Italy, while Venice owns Ancona, Dalmatia, and whatever they've been able to grab from the Byzantines in Greece. This runaway success is compounded on the rare occasion when a feudal dynast is elected to a town (which happens invisibly and really isn't supposed to happen at all unless the player initiates). If the town is his first and primary title, all the feudal lands he inherits are assimilated into the republic, with successors generated randomly rather than inheriting or being appointed. Actually, one of the longstanding complaints on the Paradox forum is that duke-level republics make much better vassals than feudal lords do. They never plot for your title, are never inherited by outside powers, never form alliance networks with other dukes in your realm, and always pay huge sums of money. For all intents and purposes, you should regard CK2+ as a difficulty mod. Vassals rebel more, kingdoms crumble more, and characters die more. As a student of history myself, I consider it pretty much indispensible, because it prunes out so much gamey bullshit and gives everything a much more authentic feel, but the Paradox forum is full of people that hate the many ways the mod seeks to frustrate the player.

I'm loving what you've got going so far, Codicier. Learning Crusader Kings 2 is mostly getting fluent in how the game handles marriage, inheritance, and war. After that, it's all just permutations. Since my Norwegian CK2+ game got broken with one of the latest updates (I'd taken a break for a week after forming the Britannian Empire from the crowns of Norway, Sweden, England, Finland, Scotland, and Wales, with major inroads in Ireland and Denmark, only to find that the save wouldn't load when I came back), I've been playing a vanilla game with the new Muslim DLC. I started as the Kalbid sheikh of Palermo in Sicily and have acquired all of Italy and North Africa between Gibraltar and the Nile, as well as Burgundy, Croatia, Serbia, peninsular Greece, Mediterranean France and Spain, and Germany as far north as Thuringia. Like I said earlier in the thread, Muslims play completely different from Christians in vanilla, though I'm not sure I like much of it. The decadence mechanic offers an interesting balance between creating cadet lines to ensure heirs in an emergency and executing all your relatives to maintain maximum economic efficiency, but the rest is nothing short of nuts. Muslims can declare war on pretty much anyone at any time, whether holy wars or just regular conquests, which means that the best and most prosperous realm is one that's constantly at war, where all the game's weaknesses are in limelight. It's a great power fantasy to swallow up a kingdom or so per ruler unless one happens to fall terminally ill during Ramadan, but it's not why I play Crusader Kings 2. I'm already fantasizing about a CK2+ game as a doggedly loyal duke of Saxony or Bavaria once I've finished conquering all of Europe as a two-province Muslim power.

Have you done any online play at all, then? I probably want to hold off until I can play a few more campaign missions through and fill out my unit deck, but I'm reasonably excited. This is something I haven't tried since my brief and torrid affair with Shogun 2 multiplayer.

That game and its expansion got rightfully slagged for a lot of reasons, but I've never encountered a cleaner and more attractive space combat model, even if it was only two-point-five dimensions.

You can only press the claims and revoke the titles of your direct vassals (and even then only if crown laws are strong enough to allow it). What you'd have to do is revoke your son's title as Lord Mayor, then click on the top-left shield of the castle and revoke that. The county will then automatically reorganized so that the castle is the primary holding, at which point you'd right-click on the town, hit the "create vassal" button to create your own vassal mayor, then grant your son the county as Count. Fair warning, everyone will hate you by this point (the entire process will net you a -40 opinion total to all your vassals, including your son), so you'll have to keep all your vassals imprisoned until your short life comes to an end. It might be more convenient either to do all of the above and then promptly die, or to simply have another son. Your call. And no worries, there will be worse disasters yet to come. I personally think it's garbage. A few features are really cool, like the so-called "megawar" system and the duels, but the rest just remove interesting aspects of the vanilla game. With no pope, no foreign cultures, and no distinctive geographical features, save for one homogenous all-encompassing kingdom, all five games I've played involve sitting and quietly improving my holdings for centuries, praying for a war to break out so I'll have something to do. If you play as the Iron Throne or one of the Lords Paramount it's more exciting, since you occasionally start those wars, but the experience of the ninety-nine percent is incredibly bland. I can see people who love the books and are committed to roleplaying enjoying themselves, but as a game it's actually pretty disappointing.

Edited because the merged threads made me look like a crazy person. That might be a little problematic for me, living stateside, but all I'm doing is studying for doctoral exams until the end of August, so we'll see.

Female fertility dries up almost totally after forty. Male fertility starts a rapid decline after fifty-five, though vanilla fertility rates are so inflated that you'll still see eighty-year-old men having kids sometimes. If you can find some woman past forty in the marriage browser (the button with the two gold rings next to a character's portrait when you left-click on it), the AI will probably be desperate to marry her off, which is good because you might get a better alliance than usual and you don't want your half-brother breeding rivals for your son, anyway. Also, did you install your son as Count (in charge of the castle) or Lord Mayor (in charge of the town) in Ormond? The latter is excluded from the succession (or rather, supposed to be but it frequently bugs out).