Gatazhk

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Posts posted by Gatazhk


  1. On 2/16/2020 at 8:05 AM, Kalle said:

    Any suggestions on the best way to get into the Three Kingdoms? 

     

    I ask because I feel like my complete lack of familiarity with the characters is really hurting my enjoyment of a game I otherwise think is the best Total War game mechanically. I just don't care at all about Liu Bu while I find myself deeply invested in the fated of Karl Franz and Tyrion. 

    I didn't know anything about 3K but have really enjoyed playing TW:3K as a historical epic.  On the other hand, even though I love the Total War series, TW:Warhammer left me bored and I've bounced off every campaign despite repeated tries.  It may be for some of us, once you develop a mindset about what Total War is, it's hard to cross over to a completely different context (i.e. historical v. fantasy).


  2. More bad news from the good folks at Valve:

     

    https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/06/07/valves-abdication-of-responsibility-over-steam-is-the-worst-possible-solution/

     

    Delicious quote:

     

    Quote

    "This pretence that their ultimate goals are to facilitate wonder and sparkles, rather than their taking nearly a third of every sale for the honour, has become deeply tiresome. And when they’re profiting from what they’re selling, of bloody course they should be considering whether they’re comfortable with the sources of that income. This incessant and frankly childish obsession with abdicating responsibility away from themselves and onto those from whom they profit (developer and customer) is outrageously transparent."

     


  3. Another Totalwaraholic chiming in here. 

     

    My memories are unencumbered by childhood or youth - in the sense that I was deep into marriage and children when I first encountered Total War. It was Medieval 2 and I thought it was kind of silly till I discovered mods like Stainless Steel and Broken Crescent. I still wasn’t hooked though. 

     

    What made me a Total War fanatic wasn’t any actual game, it was my idea of a game during the run up to Empire:Total  War.

     

    Somehow I managed to fantasize that we’d have battles with tens of thousands of individually animated authentically uniformed pike and muskets faithfully recreating the wars of Louis XIV, with great battles and epic fort sieges of countervailing trenches, before gradually moving to the more familiar Seven Years War and then on to the revolutions and Napoleon. Instead we got the buggy 1/2 finished mess of small stacks and even more limited AI that was Empire. 

     

    As disappointed as I was with the reality of Empire (ETW) - and later Total War Rome 2 - it didn't matter because I had dreamt of something awesome.  After 700 hours flailing around in ETW with Darthmod it was on to each successive historical release, always hoping for a breakthough.  I’ve put at least 500 hours into each historical game. 500 hours is one month of waking time x 6 titles = half a year of my life.  In reality I've spent probably more like 10 months because I put even more time into ETW, Rome 2 and Attila, always fiddling with mods, chasing the dream.  At this point, I’m approaching the half way mark to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours of  becoming “world class” at Total War and I haven’t even played MP yet!

     

    While each total war iteration has disappointed me in myriad ways, each one served as a roughly cut paving stone on the pathway to my dream...always "maybe they’ll get the next one right, they’ll innovate and gather momentum, drawing closer to my ultimate Total War fantasy -- a game of military history sprung to life.

     

    Then Warhammer arrived, the same Total War as all the others really, but a setting so antithetical to the great historical epic in my head that I was no lonoger able to able to hold onto the dream.  What I’d imagined and what I'd hoped for all these years -- through 3 computer builds and one huge, beautiful 4K panel --was at best a mirage and at worst a hustle (we all remember the deceptive "pre-alpha" siege of Carthage trailer). But Warhammer brought my disgust home -- a disgust at my own culpability in all this.

     

    Fortunately with Thrones of Britannia the dream has been so streamlined I’ve been able to revert to a stance of bored disinterest.  Then Total War: Romance of the Three Kingdoms looks to pick up where Warhammer leaves off, then more Warhammer.  Thus my feelings for Total War have been streamlined and unlike the games, I believe I’m a better man for it. :P

     


  4. Congratulations to the entire Campo Santo team!  I hope everyone got paid, and paid well indeed!

     

    I've personally never gotten over the CS GO skins gambling scandal and Valve's role in it, which was to willfully ignore it while perfecting the loot box economy that made it all possible. I sort of see Valve as an epitome of the libertarian tech boss so often lampooned on Important if True.

     

    In other words I've got mixed feelings.  But hey, video games!

     


  5. The more I hear about this game, the less interested in I am in playing it.  That said,  I haven't seen anything particularly compelling that shows how the game is  "bad history."  It actually seems that the historical details in the game are quite firm, if stilted in its representation of women.

     

    The core of the historical criticism seems to be aimed at the lack of people of color depicted in the game.  Yet KC:D reportedly features the Cumans, who were a Turkic group displaced to Hungary during the Mongol invasions.  If some are clamoring for Africans (specifically sub-Saharan Africans) to be featured in the game, that would not be historically accurate for 15th Century rural Bohemia.  This is an odd basis for criticism because it seems to demand skewed history in order to get even with someone who's got Alt right sympathies etc.    Find something genuinely alt-right in the game to make this case .  For example, how are the Cumans depicted in the game?  Is that depiction historically accurate, given the time and setting?

     

     


  6. Prey is my GOTY.  How original.  But it's got a killer combo of action, tactics, planning, story, exploration, and experimentation.

     

    There are some huge caveats, such as:  I only game on PC, I don't play sidescrollers or platformers (nothing since Trine 2 anyway) and I only have time for 10-12 games a year. 

     

    Honorable mention from the strategy category:  Byzantine Games' Field of Glory II.

     

     

     


  7. On 6/11/2017 at 9:12 PM, Cordeos said:

    Open world Metro sounds interesting, my main issue with the earlier games were the linear nature of them. What I really want is a new S.T.A.L.K.E.R. :(
     

     

    Yeah I got excited for this too. But then I found out through PC Gamer that it's going to be the same linear Metro.  The STALKER/FC2 open world itch remains unscratched. 


  8. The desire to change formats is understandable. I hadn't noticed a drop off in episode quality - you guys are pros- but why keep grinding when you'd like to try something new? Go for it!!!

     

    I'd just like to say thanks for helping stoke my enthusiasm for games on an almost weekly basis --all the more so as I realize your having to play constantly to inform the podcast grew stale and might have developed into a bummer.

     

    I don't play games every week - let alone new games - and I can certainly see how exhausting that would be, year in and year out on top of other jobs and commitments.

     

    Looking forward to the new show!


  9. I bought this and would like to give it a shot when it's out of early access.

     

    I am a bit obsessed with how to make large-scale battles fun to fight at, say, a company or regimental scale, but running the whole battle against the AI and have it be challenging and enjoyable.

     

     It should be possible to make an overall deployment and battle plan for a large scale battle like

    Antietam, sit back and watch the battle unfold in "real time" and make decisions about which sectors to take over and micro for a limited period.  

     

    This would also allow for occasional large scale orders like assault, skirmish, defend, draw arrows etc at a divisional scale. The battlefield would be arranged in sections - each perhaps a Total War scale of about 20 units - which you could then take over and try to micro. 

     

    I hope this is something Nick Thomadis and his team are seriously thinking about for the future, especially for the large scale battles of the 18-19th Century. Would love to see UG beat Creative Assembly at their own game, especially seeing how bogged down in the fantasy arcade style CA is at the moment. 


  10. Got this over the holidays and made it through the inevitable Paradox learning curve with the help of You tubers like Bridger. 

     

    My first HOI. Really enjoying the era specific Grand Strategy feeling that permeates the game.  I'm also digging my first Japan in WW2 strategy play through in any game ever.

     

    I am finding the army order mechanics VERY fiddly, so I tend to micro the battles  but I'll keep trying to master those controls.

     

    Fighting a land war in China was intensely fun but it's all over now and Mao is toast.  I let Chaing have Tibet and Xingiang as a consolation.  It's  time to take to the seas and build the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity sphere,while hopefully sinking dozens of Anglo American fleets in the process 😀 

     

    Aluminum is going to be a resource problem though and I need those Zeros!

     

    I love combined arms games, I just wish HOI didn't have all those endless entire fleet v.s. 1-2 ship battles like EU and CK have. Oh well can't have everything.

     

    Perhaps I'll I become disenchanted as I dig deeper -- I've struggled with EU and Vicky in the past- but this has been a lotta fun for $25 or so.  

     

     

     

     


  11. On 1/6/2017 at 6:02 AM, Sorbicol said:

    The AI in my game been a little disappointing I have to say - it appears incapable of upgrading units at all (I still see some level 3 warrior units meandering around when I'm rocking mobile infantry and modern tanks, and that civ is capable of building it's own tanks) I've also had a couple of instances of Civ with whom I have maintained good relations throughout the game suddenly just declare war on me when their crossbowmen and knights don't have a hope in hell against my tanks and helicopters and bombers etc. It definitely still needs some work.

    This has been my experience.  The AI, especially with respect to maintaining units and fighting is basically broken.  This spoils the game for me because once you realize there's no AI military threat it's too easy to manage. If they can bring a Civ 4 level military threat into the game through patches, it could be  one of the best Civs ever.  I really do hope they get into fixing  the AI so I can return to the game and lose myself in multiple play throughs. 


  12. My problem is time.  Either I buy games a year after release, or I buy them at release but don't have the weeks off to play them all.  Just bought Hitman for example, and I'm still waiting to play Rocket League that sits in my library.  At least I've launched it once or twice.  

     

    Anyway, I have two Gotys, both for exposing me to new kinds of video game experiences -- neither are in my wheelhouse but I've sunk dozens of hours into:

     

    Dark Souls 3 - my first Souls' experience (thanks Nick) which I still haven't quite finished 60 hours in :P

     

    Deserts of Kharak -- the first RTS I've actually managed to get into (thanks for the tip, Rob & Co.)

     

     


  13. 6 hours ago, Rob Zacny said:

    You know, I had misgivings about the conversation we had at the start of this episode. Not that we shouldn't have had it, or that I regretted what we said, but just that I know some people are probably burned-out on hearing about this right now and I like Idle Weekend to be kind of a cool, cheerful place to hear lively discussion.

     

     

    1 hour ago, Danielle said:

     When I was editing, I thought seriously about cutting way down on the politics talk at the top, but I decided to leave it in, because, well, I thought it was ok to have an episode like this. I don't think we're going to be the idle politics podcast or anything, and I certainly don't want to be. But it felt like an honest chat about where we were, and I stand by that. 

     

    As always, thank you, sincerely, for being such a rad community.

     

    Actually, I was counting on you two to do this conversation.  It was welcome and needed.  You did not disappoint.  :)


  14. Yeah that's cool. I'm just trying to point out that those sites you don't like are part of the fabric of modern day Greece and very important to the modern day culture of the Greek people. You don't have to like them - but if you miss them, you kind of miiss Greece. 

     

    I get how a day with hundreds of tourists slogging through the heat up to see the Parthenon might be a bummer, but for every experience like that there is something else that is ancient and sublime available to someone with an interest in the classical past like Rob.  The remnants of ancient temple or complex at a gorgeous site with spectacular views and few if any tourists around.

     

    Dunno -  been awhile since I've been to Greece maybe it's all been spoiled now? Damn Euro!

     


  15. 20 hours ago, jennegatron said:

    History is interesting to me because it's the narratives and stories we construct about events that happen in a desperate attempt to determine cause and effect not because someone used to wrestle near some columns that are now fallen over.

    History is about time and place.  So if you're in the place, then you're halfway there. 

     

    I should point out also that the Greeks themselves (the modern day ones, that is) wear their ancient heritage proudly on their sleeve.  They cherish their past, and they see a direct line from Homer through the conflict with Persia, to Alexander, Roman times, the thousand years of Christian Byzantium, the Turkish occupation to the present.  And in major towns like Athens and Corinth, the backdrop to their daily lives is the acropolis, just as in ancient times.


  16. Lol, so many many great memories with FC2.  It was my first FPS game, and it shipped free with a Nvidia card and I almost didn't bother to install it.  After dozens of hours of insane adventures with FC2 I was totally up for another shooter so I bought Battlefield Bad Company 2.   I quit that game within minutes, after realizing that you couldn't just run around a big open world, explore and do whatever you wanted.  Really pissed me off. :P