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I am probably in the minority but I find that just never ever taking Lightning Strike leads to a much cooler game. The best battles are the ones where you are fighting like 3 AI stacks at once and I wouldn't want to spend an upgrade point on something that kills the fun. I almost never ambush either. Don't get me wrong, Lightning Strike is obviously a super powerful level up choice. It's just one of those things where I find some players will do their best to optimize the fun out of the game, like the overwatch crawl in XCOM.
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May 10, 2022 05:06
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| # ? Jun 7, 2024 14:31 |
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Mr. Grapes! posted:optimize the fun out of the game I dislike phrasing like this. Some people actually enjoy minmaxing. Some people like smashing their toys together, ratling go *brrrrrrrrrrr* Both are fine. Both are fun.
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May 10, 2022 05:35
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I am definitely the "smash the toys together" person. I don't really give a poo poo about min/max-ing these games, I just want to watch my kaiju fights. Minotaur charges are still one of the most satisfying experiences in this series (especially with the blood DLC).
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May 10, 2022 05:37
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I don't like minmaxing but my brain gravitates to this strategy automatically. I don't often use lightning strike though as I spend most of my turns in ambush strike anyway and just try to guide armies into me.
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May 10, 2022 06:16
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Two points in LS now is a nice middle ground for me. You get a decent amount of time to fight the enemy alone which makes a decent difference.
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May 10, 2022 11:20
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I dislike phrasing like this. Some people actually enjoy minmaxing. Some people like smashing their toys together, ratling go *brrrrrrrrrrr* i think there are games, especially when they're multiplayer games, that absolutely cannot stand up to that kind of mechanical scrutiny. going nothing but lightning strike doomstacks and never actually developing your territory because the returns on investment are way too small is probably the best choice objectively but boy does it invalidate a huge part of the game. these games are also known as "poorly designed". the inverse can also really be true as well, tho - players that just refuse to take a game on its terms because they have habits from other games they refuse to adjust - sort of, funhaving the fun out of a game, I guess. it comes up a lot in 4x games, i feel.
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May 10, 2022 15:56
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what exactly IS a game
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May 10, 2022 17:00
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I dislike phrasing like this. Some people actually enjoy minmaxing. Some people like smashing their toys together, ratling go *brrrrrrrrrrr* I believe this is more aimed at people who do this and then go "i'm not having fun". Nobody complains about people who optimise and go "this is awesome".
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May 10, 2022 17:03
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I dislike phrasing like this. Some people actually enjoy minmaxing. Some people like smashing their toys together, ratling go *brrrrrrrrrrr* this is correct. I love breaking games but when I replay FFT, I don't ever take it to the extreme of maxing any stats or even grinding up speed, not because it removes all challenge, but because the yield isn't worth it, imo. You don't even need to de-level to be able to take on the hardest fights if you understand how the CT works and show up with the right class, with the right levels and abilities in other classes. If you want to remove all challenge, though, you can just use save states or you can mindlessly grind up whatever stats you want or just use Arithmancy provided you understand the underlying mechanics. Same with FF8. I'll grind cards to the point of having Flare for every character early on (at least one going into the SEED exam), being ready to upgrade to final weapons early on and have holy when it becomes available. But why do it for meteor when I can use other mechanics and draw it really fast? Same for Ultima. Also screw trying to max out Luck or go for a "perfect" game. If people want to do that, they can, but it's not for me. It's all about player preference.
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May 10, 2022 17:04
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I do. I complain when people have fun the incorrect way, which is any way that is not how I do it.
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May 10, 2022 17:05
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I'm complaining about ur postin' 
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May 10, 2022 17:06
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Tiler Kiwi posted:i think there are games, especially when they're multiplayer games, that absolutely cannot stand up to that kind of mechanical scrutiny. going nothing but lightning strike doomstacks and never actually developing your territory because the returns on investment are way too small is probably the best choice objectively but boy does it invalidate a huge part of the game. I still can't decide if the Total War games are poorly designed or just very poorly balanced. There is a tension between the simcity/civ elements of building up your settlements and empire while trying to push you into total war that they just never seem to be able to hit the balance on. Some factions are better than others, some games are better than others, but regardless, it always ends up feeling like its trying to be two different games at once; these often fight each other more often than they compliment each other.
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May 10, 2022 17:11
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slambo when
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May 10, 2022 18:08
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Min maxers help push game developers to develop games that then punish fun havers. As such, min maxers are a blight on gaming and game developers should not suffer them.
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May 10, 2022 18:28
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if you want to see what happens to a game with end stage munchkin disease just look at dungeon crawl stone soup
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May 10, 2022 18:33
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moonmazed posted:if you want to see what happens to a game with end stage munchkin disease just look at dungeon crawl stone soup honestly no idea what the hell is up with those guys lately, it's some kind of game design neurosis
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May 10, 2022 18:34
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min maxing arises as a response to poor balance. e.g. lightning strike and ambush abuse exist because the AI will send 12 armies across the map specifically to chokeslam the player into the dirt. choosing honourable fun and losing one of these lopsided battles (even while perhaps inflicting heavy casualties on the invaders) doesn't offer a reprieve or grant a future strategic advantage, it just makes the player lose the campaign when the next wave arrives
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May 10, 2022 18:38
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Speaking of W2 mods, this one looks pretty interesting to me. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2780820107&searchtext=chaos+invasion Apparently it's supposed to spawn tons of Chaos aligned armies all over the world during the Chaos Invasion so that it's not just the Empire and Naggarond getting hit, including Skaven hitting various racial capitals. I think I'm going to try it out because the Chaos Invasion is pretty lackluster. There's also this cool mod, that changes faction names based on accomplishments. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/discussions/2738603271 I'm still in the neighborhood searching for a mod that fixes some bugs I've encountered with Gotrek and Felix. Namely that it takes a long, long time to recruit them from the 1st to 2nd time (upwards of 60 turns), and eventually their script gets broken and they never go away, so there's no way to see their traits increase. I've found this; https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2327009207&searchtext=gotrek+felix and this; https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2292345553&searchtext=gotrek+felix The second one seems more of what I'm looking for.
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May 10, 2022 19:13
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moonmazed posted:if you want to see what happens to a game with end stage munchkin disease just look at dungeon crawl stone soup Sorry to hear that. I had a lot of fun with that game some years back and was thinking of giving it another go some time.
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May 10, 2022 21:24
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They removed the mountain dwarf race but kept the not-duergar. That's a grudgin', IMO.
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May 10, 2022 21:32
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moonmazed posted:if you want to see what happens to a game with end stage munchkin disease just look at dungeon crawl stone soup So what happened? I have no reference point here.
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May 11, 2022 03:18
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Bloodly posted:So what happened? I have no reference point here. It’s complex, but DCSS is a roguelike that branched off Linleys Dungeon Crawl in the mid-2000’s, and has a team of developers that try and put out 2 new versions a year with notable changes. There’s a big emphasis on removing tedium, specifically the tedium a Hypothetical Optimal Man would create and replacing it with meaningful decisions. Sometimes the big decisions include things like removing a race (mountain dwarf) for being boring with poor flavor, and generally strong picks that overshadow other race choices. Those decisions tend to annoy people because even if you don’t really play MD you can understand that it doesn’t cost hardly anything to keep them in. Other choices are received even more poorly. Hunger was removed - controversial because it had been in the game since the start, and one of the reasons was that it was vestigial now. The counterargument was the devs had gradually made it vestigial, and in removing it they were moving the game one step closer to a smooth sphere. However, this removal was a problem because a couple players decided to essentially farm forever as a proof-of-concept. So the devs added in a system where if you’re on a level for too many turns (5-10x what a normal “very slow” player would take) the dungeon kills you, with ample warning. This serves to deter a behavior that almost nobody was really engaging in, that had close to no benefit and that was only possible because of the removal of another system that people felt like shouldn’t have been removed. So, DCSS is a game-by-committee that keeps smoothing over all the cool gnarly bits of flavor, run by devs who seem most interested in designing a better challenge for the small subset of players that have 100+ wins and are bored to the point of testing their ability & patience playing to the absolute limit. All of this is to say that there are a number of branches off DCSS including gooncrawl, which you can find in the thread, but I cannot easily link right now. e: that was really long, sorry TW:WH3 thread! Chakan fucked around with this message at 03:51 on May 11, 2022 |
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May 11, 2022 03:47
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Yeah I'm not saying "Don't choose Lightning Strike and Ambush all the time". I'm trying to say if you do that and then complain about the campaign being boring, then maybe don't do that. Is the campaign poorly designed and unbalanced. Of course it is. I don't know any games of this scale that can even manage it. Stellaris, Hearts of Iron, Civ, all of them have very Gamey Strats that can lead to a boring and successful campaign. It depends on how much you can get into the headspace of just aiming for what you enjoy even if it means not playing perfectly optimally. If I was in charge of balancing lightning strike I'd just have the ammo not replenish and make your guys fatigued so you at least have some interesting choices involved in using it. Like, I'm sure it is optimal to shuffle my Retinue Followers and items around constantly, even with the delay, because I could min-max some economic edge by putting the +10% income guy on my General when he's in my own lands and then swapping his Badass Sword to some other General that is about to have a big battle, but it's incredibly tedious and boring and even my half-rear end roleplaying would not allow me to relieve my Gobbo Boss of his favorite choppan just so the other guy can borrow it while smashing a stunty crew. My best experiences of the game have been keeping battle difficulty at normal and cranking up campaign difficulty, while avoiding the cheeseball strats like corner camping, lightning strike, and doomstacks. I do have a few mods though, one of which limits the Cool Units you can build so you can't field doomstacks of 20 cannons or whatever, not that I'd really want to. I get into lots of huge fun field battles without having to abuse any mechanics, I don't think I ever use Ambush unless I get it offensively when I'm rats. I'm not amazingly skilled or anything and fight half my battles in slo-mo, but it keeps a fun challenge and gets me into giant scraps. I lose towns sometimes but I think of that as interesting rather than a halt on my 'progress', because snowballing is boring and it's fun to have the AI go raze a few cities here and there. I'll make gimmick armies of all Goblin Cavalry just for thematic fun and see how they do, rather than producing the same stack over and over, etc. Hamwarmer Total War is always gonna be pretty drat flawed, so I think it is kind of up to the players to make the most of it. I just see people say "I do X all the time and I'm bored" and my response is "maybe don't do X". Waiting for CA to 'fix' the game is endless - I've been playing since Shogun 1 and the AI will always be dumb, and if anything I feel like it's gotten dumber. It never survived the transition from the boardgame map and I wish it still had it. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 05:38 on May 11, 2022 |
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May 11, 2022 05:34
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So while we're all starved for info, there's this post on reddit right now: https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/umvmx7/nkari_starts_in_chrace_in_immortal_empires/ I guess this guy is a modder and was digging around in the files. There's a few things of note here: 1. N'Kari, at least in whatever version of IE this script was written for, starts on Ulthuan, in Chrace? 2. There's mention of "theaters", which may not be Empire-style theaters like we're thinking of them, but perhaps related to AI processing or something? Unsure. 3. Ulthuan may be 22 provinces instead of ME's 16. 4. Ulthuan's "theater" apparently includes the following LLs as starts: Tyrion, Alarielle, Morathi, Wulfrik, Noctilus, Grom and Nkari. The donut is going to be a lot less homogenous. No mention of Alith Anar on Ulthuan, so he's probably still starting somewhere in the New World. Morathi, Wulfrik, and Grom possibly being moved to the donut is a big change. Looks like they're toying with making Ulthuan a lot less "safe", Alarielle is gonna have a hell of a time. Obviously, take all of this with a huuuuuuuuuuuge grain of salt, first and foremost because this is speculation, and secondly because it's speculation based on potentially months/years old scripts without any further elaboration.
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May 11, 2022 06:02
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Gonkish posted:So while we're all starved for info, there's this post on reddit right now: https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/umvmx7/nkari_starts_in_chrace_in_immortal_empires/ If the theater thing is used for AI that would be fantastic. It's something that the AI very clearly does not give a poo poo about in game 2 and is likely a large reason why it can be so psychotically dumb. Even just a VERY simple theater distance measure with large decreases to level of "care" about things happening in theaters that aren't in your present controlled territory could go a long way towards the AI not going on expeditions while leaving themselves exposed to players/other AIs in strange ways. Usually going AFTER the player, but occasionally going on whatever hell war against someone else while their home area burns.
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May 11, 2022 06:55
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It would also be pretty sweet if they put in a system where you could choose how big the map is and what parts are included. Would mean they could have as big a map as possible without squishing provinces or cutting off the bottom of continents, because whatever issues might arise you can always choose a smaller chunk for a more focussed game.
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May 11, 2022 07:02
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Gonkish posted:So while we're all starved for info, there's this post on reddit right now: https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/umvmx7/nkari_starts_in_chrace_in_immortal_empires/ It's gonna be an insane thunder dome if this is true, might actually finished a HE run. It'd be cool if when you defeated the chaos god factions they just went back to the realms of chaos and had to wait for a rift like mechanic to come back so you'd never truly wipe them out unless you went to the realms of chaos and uber banished them.
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May 11, 2022 08:29
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Norsca without having to actually own any of Norsca, you say  Also, re: ambush- since it's come up lately, the main strength isn't actually getting an ambush battle. It's turning your stack invisible for a turn so the AI stops playing keep-away. It's not 100% necessary but it's very helpful.
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May 11, 2022 09:57
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LS does fatigue your troops at least. But yeah, they should keep the fatigue and ammo loss somehow. Or just say each army gets one LS per turn. Still great, doesnt let you fight several armies at once.
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May 11, 2022 11:39
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as I've said before, people don't just engage in "optimal but boring" play for no reason. it's boring to put walls and garrisons on every settlement you have, but the alternative is the AI backcapping your stuff. it's boring to run artillery & gunline armies over mixed compositions, but the alternative is running headlong into inflated stat bonuses and attrition gameplay. it's boring to play on harder difficulties, but the alternative is an AI that does nothing and provides no challenge at all some of this is about missing mechanics, particularly around logistics: armies marching all over the world, conjuring ammunition out of nowhere deep inside hostile territory. some of it is about having the AI play by the same rules as the player, even though they have different purposes and roles in the game. some of it is just kinda the natural result of the game as designed - the snowball/death spiral dichotomy of all strategy games, with only the most token mechanics to try and neutralise that
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May 11, 2022 12:07
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Gonkish posted:So while we're all starved for info, there's this post on reddit right now: https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/umvmx7/nkari_starts_in_chrace_in_immortal_empires/ Having theatre focus ai would be really cool, as I kind of get tired of seeing Tyrion in ME abandon Ulthuan to go conquer Naggarond, and by turn 130, Tyrion and the Witch King have flipped positions. Having the AI shift focus over time as initial theatres have bee conquered will be really, really nice. Also, if N'Kari is going to be moved to Ulthuan, I wonder where the other chaos god factions may get moved. The Tzeentch bird makes sense still near Cathay, but what about Khorne or Nurgle?
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May 11, 2022 13:03
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All of Ulthuan belongs to Durthu i told him, sorry
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May 11, 2022 13:19
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Skarbrand is going to be put close to Skavenblight, I can feel it in my bones. Edit: Hi Artists! Blooming Brilliant fucked around with this message at 19:12 on May 11, 2022 |
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May 11, 2022 13:19
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Pigbarter will be it’s own theater with five LLs starting standing around it in a circle
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May 11, 2022 13:21
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Twigand Berries posted:All of Ulthuan belongs to
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May 11, 2022 13:22
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Twigand Berries posted:All of Ulthuan belongs to THANQUOL, YES-YES
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May 11, 2022 13:24
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Blooming Brilliant posted:Skarbrand is going to be put close to Skavenblight, I can feel it in my bones. It doesn't matter where they start Skarbrand, I'm going to send him to Lustria to kill the jungle.
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May 11, 2022 13:24
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Not sure I like Nkari on Ulthuan proper, tbh. Close, yes, but like with Grom and Ulthuan I'd rather start close but still have some buildup before going after my campaign enemy.
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May 11, 2022 13:33
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TheLastRoboKy posted:It doesn't matter where they start Skarbrand, I'm going to send him to Lustria to kill the jungle. No nobler purpose. Lustrian thunderdome is tailor made for Khorne.
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May 11, 2022 14:01
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| # ? Jun 7, 2024 14:31 |
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I literally never use Lightning Strike and still clear on Very Hard because I am a gaming adonis. Imagine how weak and baby brained you would need to be to always take lightning strike “because you need it”.
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May 11, 2022 14:15
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