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Hey, submarines don’t even get an announcement when they’re introduced. They just show up and start being mildly useful. I say mildly because they can only attack sea based units if I recall correctly and every player I’ve seen including the AI protects their ships with flyers and/or towers, both of which can see subs. So they’re kinda useless. Except as a momentary surprise when your oil platform is suddenly under attack by something you can’t see. Then you realize what it is from its projectile and you get a fleet with a flyer over there to take out the sub before its mild damage causes too much trouble. Never seen the AI put more than a couple subs together. Some multiplayers make better use of them, but they are an afterthought in the main game.
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Oct 23, 2022 19:51
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Cythereal posted:Given the inspiration for the mogu, I'd assume Lei Shen is based on Chinese myth or fantasy traditions.
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Oct 24, 2022 03:34
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Alliance 10: The Wages of Sin Fair warning, this update was cobbled together from multiple saves so don't be alarmed if things don't look quite right.   How are you feeling? Do you really have to ask? As a matter of fact, yes. You're my friend, Azélie. I suspected this was coming from the moment my uncle refused to join the Alliance. That doesn't make this any easier, though. I'm very much tempted to resign my commission and run. Run where? There is nowhere on Azeroth the Horde won't strike. The only reason I know Shen-zin-Su is safe is that the Horde doesn't know where he is. I know. Forgive an idle flight of fancy. I can't run from this war, and I can't hide from it. We know how this is going to end. Even if Menethil and Antonidas are prepared to forgive, Trollbane and Windrunner never would. You're a dutiful woman, Azélie. I hate 'duty.' I hate this feeling of responsibility to my home, to the Alliance, to the soldiers under me. But if I requested another post, what then? I'll have proven that I'm unwilling to confront traitors in our midst, possibly been complicit in their work. No one would trust me again. No one would show mercy to my people. I hate them, Xiulan. Hate whom? The High Command? The Horde, for forcing us into this position. Whatever they told my uncle, whatever they promised... I hate every single one of them. For now we have our orders, but Light willing we get back to focusing on the real enemy soon.  The prison convoy was en route from Caer Darrow, Captain Perenolde, when their advance escort was ambushed by Horde forces. Stratholme is in tatters after the Horde assault, but they have provided what resources they can. Gold is plentiful in the area, at least. Thank you, Warrant Officer. Let's get to work. Commander, scout the area while we continue to build up. Yes, sir. The Horde has fortified the river extensively, and the slopes of the river valley are too steep for land transit. We'll need forces on the river if there's a suitable landing location.  We're establishing a naval infrastructure, but the Horde is launching attacks from across the bay. Stormreaver clan again. The river positions are Blackrock. Hmmm. I've found a suitable landing location on the river, but there's a Blackrock base in the way. Oddly seems to be only a military outpost, I see no signs of resource infrastructure. Is there naval access? No. We'll need to clear out the Blackrock position and build ships on the river. Transports at minimum, probably a few battleships to clear the path. Ugh. That's going to be a blatantly padded out waste of time and resources. Orcs in the base! Oh fiddlesticks. You all right over there? No losses. Anything to report? ...Maybe. Details, fluffy. I've located the Stormreaver base, but also... Is that a human? Sure looks like it, and riding a horse, but he's wearing Stormreaver colors. I don't know what kind of magic that is, but I'm getting out of here! Is that... necromancy? I heard about the orcs employing necrolytes during the invasion of Stormwind, but that man looks human... What the gently caress. That has to be necromancy, but we can't worry about that very much right now. We need to beat back the Stormreaver naval presence, land at the Blackrock position, clear the path to the convoy, and escort the prisoners here. Come home, Xiulan. We're facing naval attacks, and you're the one who knows about ordering ships around. poo poo. I'll take getting shot at by cannons over whatever that magic was across the bay. Archmage Antonidas, this is Magistrix Perenolde. You caught me at a good time. What news from Stratholme? We have encountered Horde necrolytes, my lord. They appear to be employing much more sophisticated magic than Stormwind reported. What I'm sending you now is what my scrying recorded from our aerial scouts. Do you have any idea what that's a skeleton of? I... have never seen a humanoid being of that size, Magistrix. Gilnean ettins come close, but this obviously was not one of them. I wonder... You have an idea. I want to hear it. Could they have brought those bones from the portal? A plausible theory. Perenolde, your orders from the High Command are to escort a prison convoy, correct? Yes, my lord. Then I must issue a formal request from your superiors in the Kirin Tor. Do not destroy that base. I will organize a brigade to reinforce you and see this 'temple' firsthand. As you wish. I do not believe I can restrain my pandaren subordinate from pummeling their naval facilities into oblivion, however. Acceptable. Keep the Horde bottled up. We must know more about what we're dealing with here. Understood, my lord.It's not actually a requirement to save the blue base, you're free to blow them up. But there were a lot of reloads during this part that I'm skipping over, mainly involving my battleship fleet getting sunk due to their clunky responsiveness. Strangely, once I blew up the naval facilities (and a lot of peons and trolls), the Horde never attempted to rebuild them. I elected to save time and not bother wiping out the Stormreaver base.  The Stormreaver naval presence is wreckage, Captain. Commencing bombardment of the Blackrock position. Good. We'll need to clear space for a landing.  That didn't take long. Losses? Acceptable. Preparations for the landing are finishing up now, sir. I've skipped over a lot of farm building and upgrade research.  Six fully upgraded paladins and five fully upgraded rangers was, admittedly, gratuitous overkill.  The existence of these ?valleys? separated by rocks leading between the prison and your base makes me strongly suspect this mission was originally meant to introduce the Alliance's sappers. I checked, and there isn't a single new Alliance unit or building available in this mission. Just a new paladin spell I never clicked on called exorcism.  Captain, there has been a slight delay to our plans. What kind... of... I am never letting an untrained peasant near the wheel of one of my ships again.Yeah the ship is stuck. There was a glitch when I was trying to load a peasant into the transport.  XIULAN! Yes'm? You missed a Horde battleship in the river. If anyone knows how five elves sank a juggernaut with longbows from the shore before the juggernaut could fire again, I'm open to suggestions.  And yeah, there's nothing for it but to land where the red base was, build a shipyard on the south side, and build more battleships and transports on the river.  Then wind your way through the river clearing out cannon towers.  Then shuttle the prisoners from their starting point to where the red base was.  Then march them across the former red base to another transport.  And finally bring them back to the starting position.  This game may be way better than Warcraft 1, but that's a very low bar to clear.
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Oct 24, 2022 11:56
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Nevermore I'd initially planned to cover this subject after the next Alliance mission, but after some writing and thinking I've decided to cover the subject now rather than make the next Alliance update a triple header. I assume everyone knows what's about to happen. Today's subject, Alterac.  Of all the human nations in Warcraft, we know by far the least about Alterac. Unlike Stormwind, which has been talked about a great deal but very little has ever been said about it, most of Alterac's culture and history is simply unknown. We do know that the Alterac Mountains were inhabited in the earliest days of humanity, and were perceived as sacred by some. A network of passes through the mountains formed a major hub of trade among the early human tribes, and one of these early tribes that joined Thoradin's empire was identified as the Alteraci. The Alteraci were described as especially fierce and savage warriors who lurked in the mountains, descending into the lowlands to raid and pillage their neighbors. Only when Thoradin defeated their chieftain in single combat did the Alteraci relent and join Thoradin's empire, where they became renowned as the Arathi Empire's most savage shock troops. There's an implication that the warrior traditions of Stromgarde might in fact have been drawn from this original Alteraci tribe. The mountains, while a vital strategic position, had few natural resources and especially very little arable land for farming. When united in Thoradin's empire, most of the tribesmen came down into the lowlands in search of an easier life. Furthering this supposition is that we know that Alterac was the very last of the seven human kingdoms to become separate from the Arathi Empire, some 1,200 years before the First War - the same time frame given for Stormwind's independence, and Chronicles describes Alterac's independence as being a result of Strom's decline as the center of human civilization.  A map of the playable world in Warcraft 2. Stromgarde, according to Chronicles, never accepted Alterac's legitimacy as an independent kingdom, and even at the outset of the Second War, King Thoras Trollbane continued to insist that Alterac was just a breakaway provice of Stromgarde, not an independent kingdom. Nevermind that Stromgarde had periodically invaded Alterac and been driven back about every fifty or sixty years since the fall of the Arathi Empire, including twice within Thoras' lifetime. Lordaeron and Dalaran likewise mostly saw Alterac as a pawn in political games of power among the northern human realms. Alterac was largely unable to stop this, as the problems of the region remained as true in King Aiden Perenolde's time as they had in Thoradin's time. Sitting astride major trade routes through critical mountain passes, Alterac had grown very wealthy from trade and commerce among the northern realms, but the region's lack of arable land and natural resources meant that Alterac could support only a small population. Only the foreboding natural geography allowed Alterac's small army and brown-water navy to maintain the kingdom's independence from Stromgarde and Lordaeron. What little we know of Alterac's culture is that ravens were the kingdom's primary heraldic symbol, and that the nobility of Alterac held guile as the highest social virtue. Alterac had preserved its independence against all comers thanks in part to its army, yes, but also due to elaborate diplomatic maneuvers that kept the other nations from ever forming a united front against Alterac's grip on commerce throughout the northern realms. Assassination was, if not widespread, at least a widely acknowledged part of Alterac politics, and the kingdom was renowned and hated for producing many of the best spies, assassins, criminals, and merchants in human civilization. This culture, and Alterac's history of being constantly attacked by Stromgarde especially, may explain why Alterac betrayed the Alliance in the Second War.  According to Lord of the Clans, there were in fact many Alterac soldiers loyal to the Alliance who fought valiantly in the Second War on the Alliance's side. This sketch is what gave me the idea for Azélie. The only proper justification that's ever been given for Alterac's betrayal is that King Aiden Perenolde feared that the Alliance, even together, would not be able to defeat the Horde, and sided with the Horde out of fear. Only later has there been a slight effort to explore Aiden's motives in more detail: their history as victims of Stromgarde aggression, a culture that would have espoused trying to work out a deal with the Horde instead of fighting to the death, and perhaps an expectation among Alterac's people that the Horde was an aggressor no different than any human opponent that Alterac had faced throughout its history. The reason why I picked a French name for my Alteraci protagonist in this stretch of the LP was how much Alterac struck me as a fantasy version of Belgium or perhaps Switzerland, forever caught between military superpowers they could not hope to match. To date, though, the general consensus of Warcraft's story has been that Alterac was a kingdom of evil bastards who got what was coming to them. The only remotely heroic Alterac character we know leads a house of assassins, and just about every other Alteraci character we know about is a traitor, slaver, warlock, necromancer, or other kill on sight jerk. As for the royal family of Alterac, the last known member of Alterac's royal family, Prince Aliden Perenolde, was killed in vanilla World of Warcraft on Thrall's orders as a Horde sidequest. There's a couple more ambiguously canon members of the family from various secondary sources, Princess Beve and Prince Isiden, but they've never been mentioned in-game.  Alterac is probably best known to WoW era fans in the form of Alterac Valley, one of WoW's original PvP battlegrounds and probably the most [in]famous of the lot. If there's any PvP fanatics in this thread you're welcome to talk about AV, but lore-wise Alterac Vally presents the interesting implication that Alterac may have been a Titan site of some description, which is why a dwarven expedition has gone into the ruins of Alterac to see what they can find, only to run into a Horde tribe attempting to colonize the region. Oh, the actual Alteraci peoples' right to the region? They're jerks, who cares about Alterac the nation. And that appears to be Warcraft's tawdry little epitaph on the kingdom.
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Oct 24, 2022 11:57
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quote:As for the royal family of Alterac, the last known member of Alterac's royal family, Prince Aliden Perenolde, was killed in vanilla World of Warcraft on Thrall's orders as a Horde sidequest.
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Oct 24, 2022 14:02
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Exorcism is very niche. Instantly kills Death Knights or Skeletons for 200/250 mana. Useless against non undead. I never used it either.
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Oct 24, 2022 14:54
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So what I am getting is that Blizzard wanted a human-vs-human mission and came up with the lazyest method of getting to that point.
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Oct 24, 2022 14:56
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SirPhoebos posted:So what I am getting is that Blizzard wanted a human-vs-human mission and came up with the lazyest method of getting to that point. Yeah. For those who didn't know, Alliance 11 is destroying Alterac. Warcraft 2 has one mandatory Alliance vs Alliance mission and one Horde vs Horde mission each.
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Oct 24, 2022 15:07
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Alterac is sort of a microcosm of the disappointment of Warcraft's setting in most cases. Inner politics? Strife between the Alliance? How do the people feel about betraying the Alliance? Perhaps they find something in common with the Horde? Maybe they struggle in the modern day with their actions? Maybe despite it all, they have strong Horde connections in the modern day, that one weird Horde-aligned Human settlement? They ironically turn from traitors into diplomats, who seek peace because it means greater profit for Alterac? There's so many interesting twists and interactions that could happen here. Nope, LOL EVIL COWARDS. Gotta be a racial monolith for the race war, ORCS VS. HUMANS ALWAYS AND FOREVER, how could they ever get along? They're 'destroyed' so we never have to consider the implication of this political aspect of a disgraced nation and people trying to get by years later, and to prove you should never think you get to escape black and white thinking.
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Oct 24, 2022 15:32
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The text of the manual doesn't explicitly say Alterac are going to be traitors, but the tiny horde banner kinda gives it away: Also, the yellow player is labeled "Horde/Alliance Traitors" (depending on player faction) in the victory screen, but that is never used in the campaign.
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Oct 24, 2022 16:00
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achtungnight posted:Exorcism is very niche. Instantly kills Death Knights or Skeletons for 200/250 mana. Useless against non undead. I never used it either.
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Oct 24, 2022 16:34
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It's niche for you. For the ai, it's constant off screen snipes that make the death knights totally useless.
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Oct 24, 2022 17:00
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Cythereal posted:
For those who don't play wow with updated Geography, here's how the place looks on modern WoW maps.  This doesn't match any version of the maps in War2 And my memory of the Alterac description in the War2 manual was that they were described as the weakest of the nations within the Alliance, and viewed with a bit of suspicion about where they'll go when pressed. My first thought when I looked at the old map vs the new one is that an accidental misfire on a spell in Dalaran could have hit Alterac citizens.
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Oct 24, 2022 17:19
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Alterac was barely it's own zone, at least in classic. No flight paths. The only vendor worth visiting was the AV faction vendors. There were a couple of class quests that started there (rogue had it's own subfaction, while Warrior had a quest that got you a really good 2h-axe that would stay useful for a long time). And that was really it. Aside from the snowed over ruins of Alterac itself it didn't feel distinct from the Hillsbrad Foothills to the south.
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Oct 24, 2022 17:34
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Siegkrow posted:As an added note to this, Aliden was the one who was all for turning the orcs into slaves and had apparently held a woman against her will as his "mistress" IIRC, slaying Aliden was not even the primary objective of those quests; it was gathering a necklace from his mistress that had coincidentally belonged to someone dear in Thrall’s early life.
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Oct 24, 2022 18:32
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Also in WoW there was an enemy faction of bad thieves in orange who were directly opposed to the friendly faction of good rogues who populated the now defunct Alterac zone and it's southern counterpart Hillsbrad which you can see in Cythereal's map. So taking the added Chronicles history into account, Alterac was a kingdom of bandits who became a kingdom of professional criminals and then fell to becoming an organization of professional bandits.
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Oct 24, 2022 18:40
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ikanreed posted:It's niche for you. For the ai, it's constant off screen snipes that make the death knights totally useless. This fact right here is going to make some Orc missions in Beyond the Dark Portal absolutely MISERABLE. (Please do not go into detail on this, let the LP progress before discussing what I'm talking about here.) Specifically, Exorcism works similarly to Healing, in that it deals 1 damage per 4 Mana used, but uses as much mana as it can in one lump sum blast. However, the total damage dealt is *split* between any undead in the area the spell is cast in. So, if you have 40 mana when you cast it, and there are two death knights (or two skeletons, or a death knight and a skeleton) next to each other, each will take 5 damage. A Death Knight has 60 HP, so to completely one-shot a Death Knight from full health, aside from it needing to be alone, the Paladin in question must have 240 mana out of 255. ON A DIFFERENT NOTE: One trick I like to use on this map: that group of Footmen and Alterac Prisoners. Here's the thing: only four of those peasants need to survive, and the AI never attacks down there, rendering the footmen pointless except for flavor. Which means, if you want, you're fully within your rights to eliminate most of the units down there to save on Farmspace. If you select only the Peasants, the attack command is unavailable, but if you select the 8 peasants and 1 footman, you can get the peasants to attack, and allow you to take out 4 out of 8 peasants, and all the footmen down there. If you're approaching the mission as methodically as Cythereal, there will be nothing that can threaten the Peasants as you ship them back to Stratholme, so having the safety net of extra peasants is unnecessary. And yeah, the easiest thing is to just wipe out the Stormreavers' navy, and leave the base alone. You CAN go after the base if you want, but there's no reason to, and it just uses up resources you'll need to build ships on the river to the prisoners; at which point, you may well NEED to take the liberated resources from the Stormreaver base in order to finish. BlazetheInferno fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Oct 24, 2022 |
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Oct 24, 2022 18:55
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The prisoners are only able to move, they can't do anything else?
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Oct 24, 2022 20:46
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Exorcism- I have a vague memory of it being used as offscreen sniping. I definitely forgot it is an area effect and the mana cost is variable. Thanks for the reminder. Death Knights are not completely useless, at least they weren’t for me. I plan to discuss their spells in depth with Orc 11 (their intro mission). For now, I’m liking Cythreal’s descriptions of them and their abilities.
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Oct 24, 2022 20:54
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Xander77 posted:The prisoners are only able to move, they can't do anything else? Correct. They are completely helpless. SirPhoebos posted:Alterac was barely it's own zone, at least in classic. No flight paths. The only vendor worth visiting was the AV faction vendors. There were a couple of class quests that started there (rogue had it's own subfaction, while Warrior had a quest that got you a really good 2h-axe that would stay useful for a long time). And that was really it. Aside from the snowed over ruins of Alterac itself it didn't feel distinct from the Hillsbrad Foothills to the south. Alterac isn't even a zone anymore, it's a sub-area of Hillsbrad Foothills. NameHurtBrain posted:Alterac is sort of a microcosm of the disappointment of Warcraft's setting in most cases. Back when I was still writing 'what kind of stories could spice up World of Warcraft?' fanfic, the idea I kept coming back to was the last remnants of Alterac rejoining the Alliance and using them as a wedge to crack open some interesting stories about internal divisions and conflicted histories among the Alliance, the sins of its past and its uncertain future. Instead we got extradimensional BDSM man and his pancake nipples. BlazetheInferno posted:If you're approaching the mission as methodically as Cythereal, there will be nothing that can threaten the Peasants as you ship them back to Stratholme, so having the safety net of extra peasants is unnecessary. And yeah, the easiest thing is to just wipe out the Stormreavers' navy, and leave the base alone. You CAN go after the base if you want, but there's no reason to, and it just uses up resources you'll need to build ships on the river to the prisoners; at which point, you may well NEED to take the liberated resources from the Stormreaver base in order to finish. In a game I actually enjoy playing, I'd probably wipe out the Stormreavers just for fun. But I found myself not enjoying WC2 anymore around the end of the Khaz Modan arc.
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Oct 24, 2022 21:15
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Nostalgamus posted:The text of the manual doesn't explicitly say Alterac are going to be traitors, but the tiny horde banner kinda gives it away: The Warcraft and Starcraft manual descriptions are really not very subtle about who will betray their side and/or turn evil. I think it would have been kind of cool if that existing "Traitors" faction was used in the previous couple missions for some degree of mystery about who those humans helping the Horde were. Otherwise, yellow could have been "Heroes" instead and dedicated to those rescuable units like green is in Starcraft. The humans could have had both since Gilneas never appears in-game.
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Oct 24, 2022 21:45
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Cythereal posted:Correct. They are completely helpless. No, they're the same attack peasants that were "rebelling" in the prior mission. So they can attack. For like 3 damage a hit.
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Oct 25, 2022 03:00
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When I first played WC2, I liked the Alterac twist. While they don't explore it beyond "Had no faith in the Alliance"(but hey, it's a product of it's time in an RTS), the way they first have the peasant uprising, then show a few ships suddenly attacking you, followed by this escort mission made it feel like a pretty nice build up. Which, unlike the Orc VS mission they needed because they didn't have a Gul'dan.
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Oct 25, 2022 07:09
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ikanreed posted:No, they're the same attack peasants that were "rebelling" in the prior mission. So they can attack. For like 3 damage a hit. Well, the thing is, if you select just one of the peasants, the only commands on their command card are move and stop. If all you have selected is the peasants, they cannot attack anything because the attack command isn't there. You can, however, trick the game into letting them attack by grouping them with a footman, which I do to kill the footmen down there, and some of the peasants to free up food space, like I posted above. Thank God we captured more than we need to interrogate!
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Oct 25, 2022 18:25
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Fanfic- the peasants & footmen were waiting so long for retrieval they had to kill and eat each other. It’s a sad situation the survivors naturally glossed over and blamed on the Horde.
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Oct 25, 2022 21:14
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For whom it concerns, I tried starting a future lore post about the general state of technology in Warcraft and disappeared down a rabbit hole of modern military historians who have concluded that the military flail, as seen with the human knights in WC1 (and film adaptations in Gladiator and Return of the King, among others), probably never actually existed, and if it did it was a brief experiment that went nowhere. I think the next lore post will be Dalaran, actually. The first missions where we'll encounter the purple Alliance in the Horde and Alliance campaigns will have other things worth talking about, and I've decided that I'll cover death knights in detail when we meet Teron Gorefiend.
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Oct 26, 2022 21:13
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Cythereal posted:For whom it concerns, I tried starting a future lore post about the general state of technology in Warcraft and disappeared down a rabbit hole of modern military historians who have concluded that the military flail, as seen with the human knights in WC1 (and film adaptations in Gladiator and Return of the King, among others), probably never actually existed, and if it did it was a brief experiment that went nowhere. (Alternatively - sure, the kisten definitely existed, but everyone to the west of Poland just pretended to adopt it)
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Oct 26, 2022 21:39
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Xander77 posted:Nonsense by people who think Europe ends somewhere within Germany. All the sources I read agreed that the kisten existed, but historical evidence for flails existing outside of that brief experiment is virtually nonexistent. They were popular with historical artists, and a few have been found that were made specifically as replicas of flails depicted in tapestries and paintings, but outside of that brief, limited experiment in Poland, the flail does not appear to have ever been made or used as a weapon outside peasants using crudely converted threshing flails. Flails seem to be a very early example of 'artists think this weapon is cool and depict it a lot despite it never actually existing, at least not in any large scale.'
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Oct 26, 2022 21:44
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Cythereal posted:For whom it concerns, I tried starting a future lore post about the general state of technology in Warcraft and disappeared down a rabbit hole of modern military historians who have concluded that the military flail, as seen with the human knights in WC1 (and film adaptations in Gladiator and Return of the King, among others), probably never actually existed, and if it did it was a brief experiment that went nowhere. I mean if you want to add 40 pages to this thread without a single update, I couldn't think of a better way to do it than by opening the floor to milhis.
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Oct 26, 2022 22:00
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SirPhoebos posted:I mean if you want to add 40 pages to this thread without a single update, I couldn't think of a better way to do it than by opening the floor to milhis. Silly goon thinks I haven't been regularly sharing LP stuff with the goon military history discord.  I just dropped the subject in large part because the question of technological sophistication in Warcraft boils down to what race you are and that is that. Human? Early modern period. Troll? Stone age barbarian. Goblin? Steampunk. Gnome? Clockpunk. Draenei? Space crystal woowoo. And you will not deviate from this. Ever.
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Oct 26, 2022 22:08
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Cythereal posted:Silly goon thinks I haven't been regularly sharing LP stuff with the goon military history discord. Trolls have laser dinosaurs, thats very very high tech
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Oct 26, 2022 22:23
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Cythereal posted:All the sources I read agreed that the kisten existed, but historical evidence for flails existing outside of that brief experiment is virtually nonexistent. Like I implied, if you're a "medievalist" or a "military historian" but don't actually know any languages besides English (and, at best, Latin) your understanding of things is going to be terribly skewed.
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Oct 26, 2022 22:24
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Xander77 posted:Yeah, nah. The Eurasian steppes are bit beyond Poland and the kisten was an extremely common weapon all across them and among the Turkic peoples in general. If you have any links, I'd genuinely be interested, as this contradicts everything I've read on the subject.
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Oct 26, 2022 22:27
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Cythereal posted:If you have any links, I'd genuinely be interested, as this contradicts everything I've read on the subject. Start here, and get someone translate the various historical works mentioned.
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Oct 26, 2022 22:49
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Xander77 posted:https://ru-m-wikipedia-org.translat...&_x_tr_pto=wapp Very interesting, thank you! I've corroborated this with a couple of Russian speakers in the goon military history discord who agreed that yeah, Western European/American military historians not knowing poo poo about Eastern Europe and Central Asia is not exactly a surprise. I mean, it is Warcraft and humans are extremely Western Europe coded so Blizzard probably just put in flails because they thought the looked cool, but I've found it intriguing that these were in fact a real military phenomenon. I wasn't expecting to learn something new today, but there you have it. The whole medieval period, especially on land, is well outside my areas of interest in history. 
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Oct 26, 2022 23:44
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drat, and I was so very ready to learn from a Warcraft thread that all the steppe stuff I remember from middle school and museum weapon exhibits was fake. Wouldn't Western milhistory people care about the Turkic nomads because Byzanthium cared about them?
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Oct 27, 2022 00:54
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Lokapala posted:drat, and I was so very ready to learn from a Warcraft thread that all the steppe stuff I remember from middle school and museum weapon exhibits was fake. In my experience, Generally the west cares about Greece>Rome>Charlemagne>(England/France/HRE with a sprinkle of Iberia). Byzantium/East of the HRE is glanced over and talked about in vague terms. Admittedly I wasn't a Military History major, just a History major, but it tends to come down to the fact that you follow your cultural lineage backwards. Consider that we call the fall of Rome as the end of the Roman Empire, when Byzantium was still alive and kicking for another millennia. It also comes down to publications. It's hard to find anything about the east that's not in it's mother tongue. Go to a bookstore and look at all the books about presidents, guns, western wars... and the tiny section about Russia or China that's not about contemporary policies.
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Oct 27, 2022 01:08
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Lokapala posted:Wouldn't Western milhistory people care about the Turkic nomads because Byzanthium cared about them? In my experience with my history degree (my real area of interest in history is the history of science and technology, military history is just a fun more-hobby interest and I mostly focus on naval stuff), to the extent that the Eastern Roman Empire's wars came up it was mainly in the context of the rise of the Ottoman Empire, not the nomadic peoples or any of the Persian states. Most of what I know about the Eastern Roman Empire from college came from a history of Western religion class I took, where the Great Schism was a major subject.
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Oct 27, 2022 01:17
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If you want a game representing the medieval era outside western Europe, it's worth revisiting Age of Empires 2, the current development team adores medieval eastern Europe/Caucasus history and they went from just the Mongols and arguably the Huns to also having campaigns for Poland, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Cumans and Tatars in the region since the most recent re-release.
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Oct 27, 2022 11:34
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Asehujiko posted:If you want a game representing the medieval era outside western Europe, it's worth revisiting Age of Empires 2, the current development team adores medieval eastern Europe/Caucasus history and they went from just the Mongols and arguably the Huns to also having campaigns for Poland, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Cumans and Tatars in the region since the most recent re-release. I have the Definitive Edition, actually. I'm not the one to LP it, though, the medieval and early modern periods in land-based military history are well outside my areas of particular interest and knowledge and I'm bad at RTS. I'm already pretty sick of Warcraft 2, one benefit of shifting to the weekly update schedule. It's simply gotten too hard for me to enjoy.For that matter I'm considering doing a side mini-LP as a break in between Tides of Darkness and Beyond the Dark Portal.
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Oct 29, 2022 01:26
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