Anym

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    39

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Anym

  6. Posted

    Games that I played sooner than I probably would have without the podcast:

    • Trine and Trine 2, which are both excellent
    • Crusader Kings II and Europa Univeralis IV, which are both very good, the latter not really from the podcast, but I wouldn't have played it without first playing CK2 because of it
    • The Last Express, which I didn't like. Admittedly great atmosphere and writing, but coupled with a questionable story and graphics style and a bad interface and gameplay. Watching a video or strictly following a walkthrough (which I resorted to more than once) would probably have been more enjoyable than playing it

  7. Posted

    They got their first big PR bump for the game with the Game of Thrones mod, but now they're pushing a vision more in keeping with EU4, and a lot of those changes are against the systems that allowed the Game of Thrones mod to work so well in the first place.

     

    I thought you hated the Game of Thrones mod?

  10. Posted

    My second game of Crusader Kings II, didn't quite catch me the way the first one had, so I've moved on to Europa Universalis IV for now and I'm liking it so far. One thing I'm not sure about at the moment is how to best deal with allies' wars. The punishment for declining a call to arms seems rather harsh. If I join and let them negotiate for me, I end up with a bunch of crap I don't want (or worse they give away some of my stuff if they lose), if I don't let them negotiate for me I don't seem to get anything out of it for all my effort and if I negotiate a separate peace with favourable terms for myself, they hate me. Am I missing something here?

  13. Posted

    That is a very abnormal game, especially for a first time. can you give a basic timeline of how you build that empire? Are you saying you held six empire titles? because the ethnicity requirements should prevent that, unless you game the system on purpose.

     

    I'm surprised you didn't face large scale independence revolts based on how much territory with different religions and cultures you have. Or from family members attempting to grab power.

     

    Yes, over the course of the game I created the Empires of Alba, Francia, Mali, Arabia, Persia and Rajasthan. Is that a bug?

    The game went something like this, the dates for conquest referring to when I had gained enough territory to form or usurp that Kingdom:

    1066: Started as Duke of Munster

    1084: Formed Kingdom of Ireland

    1127: Conquered Wales

    1134: Peacefully gained Scotland through marriage

    1183: Holy Roman Empire took over England, halting my progress there; started waging holy war against the pagans in north-eastern Europe from a single county I happen own in Norway

    1196: Conquered Finland

    1229: Conquered Pomerania

    1245: Peacefully gained Brittany through marriage

    1255: Conquered England and formed Empire of Alba after the English duchies declared Independence from the Holy Roman Empire when it unsuccessfully tried to attack me

    1260: Conquered Lithuania and by this time also most other pagans and minor independents north-eastern Europe

    1282: Peacefully gained Aragon through marriage, giving me a much needed foothold in a new area, including new targets for holy wars

    1287: Conquered Navarra

    1288: Ilkhanate conquered Anatolia, this will become important later

    1289: Conquered France (sans independent Aquitaine), was definitely equal or superior to the Holy Roman Empire by then

    1299: Conquered Andalusia

    1314: Liberated Anatolia in a successful crusade, finally bordered the caliphates and could start attacking them

    1318: Conquered Aquitaine

    1322: Formed Empire of Francia

    1327: Conquered Mauretania

    1347: Conquered Mali and formed Empire of Mali

    1356: Conquered Syria and Jerusalem

    1365: Conquered Egypt

    1366: Conquered Frisia

    1375: Conquered Perm

    1378: Conquered Africa

    1378: Conquered Arabia and formed Empire of Arabia

    1382: Conquered Nubia

    1385: Conquered Sweden

    1389: Conquered Baluchistan

    1390: Conquered Mesopotamia

    1419: Conquered Persia

    1426: Formed Empire of Persia

    1440: Conquered Khiva

    1449: Conquered Punjab

    1450: Conquered Malwa

    1452: Formed Empire of Rajasthan

    1453: Screenshot and end

     

    Most of my territory gains came from holy wars, so I got to distribute them freely afterwards, typically to content Irish Catholic family members of mine which all loved me and as I kept expanding, there were always more of them, and they were only too happy to quickly convert the counties to our faith, too, probably helped by my religious authority always being maxed out and everyone else's crumbling as a further consequence of all those holy wars.

     

    And if, say, the Spanish lords were of a mind to start something, they'd be hard pressed to find enough levies to go against my retinues. Most of my money went into the build-up of my retinues, by the end I had more than 100,000 men permanently under arms. After some point, I conquered new duchies faster than I could save up the money to form them all, large swathes of land were just counts.

     

     

    A) Never pausing, keep the clock ticking indefinitely (unless you're literally getting up to walk off and do something else, obviously). Just to put on more pressure and prevent the perfection you reached here.

     

    That one might be a bit tricky, as I noticed the interface really lagging when the game wasn't paused (at least on my machine and with a large empire).

  14. Posted

    OK, so it took forever, but I finally, finally managed to finish my first game of Crusader Kings II and it was great (most of it anyway). From the 1066 Duke of Munster start, I managed to expand into this, being a sextuple emperor and trigintuple king at the end:

    flQHN3G.png

    And that's not even counting the minor thrones held by other members of my dynasty.

    While I did enjoy most of it very much, I also felt that it went far too well for it being my first full game. When I started, I thought the 100,000 points highscore of House Capet would be a longterm goal to beat, but I ended up with far more than twice as much in the end. Was I just lucky? Is the Munster start so powerful? Wasn't I role-playing enough? Is the default difficulty level considered to be on the easy side?

    Over the course of the game, I don't think I ever lost or had to white-peace any war ever, even though I was almost constantly at war after a certain point (for which there didn't seem to be a much of a drawback). There were two or three close calls, but the AI always failed to press its advantage instead allowing me time to regroup and ultimately enforce my demands. Nor was I (or my heir) ever assassinated (as far as I know).

    I grabbed more and more land, but nobody seemed to feel threatened by it or even care. The game didn't push back at all and snowballing was in full effect and soon no power within or outside my realm was challenging me anymore, but I kept on conquering just for the sake of it and because I could, which is also the point at which my fun started to decline as most of my time was spent either pushing huge, indefeatible retinue army stacks around (always having to pay attention that they didn't get eaten up by attrition too much) or putting down incessant and annoying, but ultimately pointless, peasant revolts. It was exhausting and not as enjoyable as the early game. Still, this being my first game and all, I was interested in seeing how far I could expand, even though I knew that a world conquest was probably out.

    However, now I'm not sure if I have another game in me. It's probably due to a combination of my inexperience, suboptimal message settings, a compulsion to micro-manage everything and warmongering way too much, but I think I must have spent almost 100 hours of that one campaign alone. Is that normal? I'm not sure if I could muster the motivation to finish another game of the length (nor am I the type of personality who can abandon and start a new game when my previous one is still unfinished).

    So, I'm not sure what to do now. If I were to play another game what would be the most different from the Ireland start? Restoring the Roman Empire starting as a lowly count somewhere in the Byzantine Empire maybe? Currently, I only have the Sword of Islam and Legacy of Rome DLCs. Should I absolutely get any of the others for my second game? Are any of the achievements particularly interesting or challenging (in a non-annoying way)?

    Also, how do they higher difficulty levels work? Do they make the AI smarter or do they just hand them bonus troops and a tendency to gang up on the player? I.e. are they more challenging or just more annoying? Similarly, I feel like a huge part of my ability to almost endlessly expand in this game were my retinues. Would disabling them by disabling Legacy of Rome make the game more interesting or also just more annoying?

    What are ways to speed up the game? Is there a way to play on the smaller, pre-expansion map, for example?

    Finally, is there any game (or a mod) that is like Crusader Kings, but plays in a fifth or a tenth of the time? Is anybody trying to make one?

    Sorry if this is all sounding a bit negative, mainly coloured by the last quarter of the game which I didn't enjoy as much. I did very much enjoy the way to becoming Emperor and then facing off against the other existing empires. It's just that once they were soundly beaten, it very much became smooth sailing and just painting the map my colour for the last century and a half.
     

  16. Posted

    This is a little off-topic, when people discuss how great films like Alien or The Thing are, I'm always intrigued, but also a little bit saddened, because I don't enjoy horror films at all and can barely watch them. Especially if they are science-fiction horror, because I very much enjoy science-fiction in general. It's the same with scary media of any kind, really. Games, for example, I feel like I missed out on many of what are conisdered classic games because they scared me too much. Even ones that usually, as far as I can tell, aren't considered to be among the scariest ones as BioShock. Of course, I'm lacking a reference because being freaked out by BioShock, I never even bothered trying something like Silent Hill.

    But then Jake said "greebled" and made me happy again. Until he apologized for saying it.

    Also, I wish people said "tetralogy" instead of "quadrilogy".

  19. Posted

    Chris talked about how Wings of St. Nazaire is actually like those space sims from back in the day but I have to correct him - Wings of St. Nazaire is indeed like Wing Commander, which used sprites rendered at various angles to represent all the ships, but it's very different from X-Wing and TIE Fighter, which, even back then, were full 3d games using polygonal ships rather than sprites. This, incidentally, is why I was a much bigger fan of the Star Wars games than the Chris Roberts games - everything was much smoother, there was a far better sense of scale and of movement, and the capital ships particularly worked far better. Of course, Wing Commander could be far more detailed with its prerendered bitmaps than X-Wing could (X-Wing had to rely on just plain Gouraud shading, which meant the ships were the right shape but entirely untextured) so Wing Commander's screenshots were much prettier, but X-Wing played much better with its full 3d fidelity.

     

    Very much this, although I have to correct you, too, by pointing out that X-Wing only had flat shading. Gouraud shading was one of TIE Fighter's improvments (which was then also used in the CD-ROM re-release of X-Wing).

     

    Also, the capital of Azerbaijan is Baku.

  20. Posted

    Does anyone know of a gaming podcast (of decent audio-quality and that talks mostly about games) with more than one woman opinionator at the same time or even a woman who is considered more than a guest?

     

    The Not a Game podcast typically features two female voices (and is mostly about games obviously), only the audio quality might not always qualify as decent, depending on your standards.

     

    Also, Ellie Gibson was a regular on the Eurogamer.net podcast for a while, but I haven't listened to that in ages.

  22. Posted

    Whoa, of all the countries I've attacked recently, the small republic of Pisa put up the most of a resistance. Do they get a bonus or something?

    Meanwhile the real drama seems to be happening closer to home. My maybe-bastard son and heir from above has started an affair with my second wife (his step-mom) while the game keeps telling me that his wife (my daughter-in-law) "might fancy me" and I already had to point out the inappropriateness of that liaison three times now.

  23. Posted

    I don't mean to sound mean, but I have to admit that I don't quite understand where Chris Roberts' reputation comes from. He hasn't made a game in ages and back when he still was making games, I always found the X-Wing and later the FreeSpace series much better than any of the Wing Commanders. Admittedly, Wing Commander came first and I only first played WC after having already played X-Wing, which may have skewed my perspective, but still, is that such a minority view of the space combat simulation genre?

  24. Posted

    I have to admit that my game has lost a bit of drive since I became Emperor. I have no interest in taking over the HRE wholesale and gaining a whole lot of probably unruly non-Celtic vassals in the process, so for now I'm mainly taking my 20K mostly heavy infantry retinue on a tour of Europe grabbing a single county or duchy, one at a time, from each of my neighbours in turn and then starting again at the beginning once I'm through with the last of them after about 10 years and the truces have expired.

     

    During one of these raids I arrogantly tried to steal Brabant from the HRE using only my retinue and no levies at all (they were also involved in another war at the other side of their realm trying unsuccessfully to get Bohemia back under their control) and thought I was doing fine, having already occupied two of counties, when I almost met disaster when a 40K stack of troops from the HRE and their allies from the ERE came into view marching towards mine. I immediately raised about 7.5K in levies from somewhat nearby Normandy and Brittany, but they wouldn't make it in time, so I took a defensive position across a river and hoped for the best.

     

    I had a better quality troops and better generals, but they still outnumbered me by 2:1 and when the battle commenced I wasn't immediately taking heavy losses, but my morale was dropping more quickly than the enemies and my reinforcements were still a way off. It wasn't looking good. Then on the third day or something I got the joyous news that my troops had actually slain the Byzantine Emperor. Good riddance, I thought, too bad that didn't seem to an effect on their morale, only to realize a couple of moments later that while their morale was still high, the size of the enemy stack had more than halved. Of course, the death of the Emperor also meant the end of the alliance and his troops just stopped fighting and alone the HRE didn't stand a chance. I still love this game, I just need to find a new long-term goal, I think.