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I bought Barbarossa and Moscow '41. I thought about Blitzkrieg too, but it was only German which is kinda meh. I'd like to play through those campaigns from all angles but alas.
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Dec 26, 2023 18:15
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Carrier Command has a lot of neat stuff going on, but it is hard as a single player. There's just so much to manage at once, and you can't take your time because you're in a race against the AI. Your aircraft also sometimes really fail to land, and your ground units also sometimes get really stuck. It happens a bit too often. Depending on your mood, it's either an annoying experience, an exciting one, or almost a meditative one.
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Dec 28, 2023 19:16
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Ok how in the ever loving gently caress does scaling work in UG:CW? I'm about to do Antietam and I've been outnumbered now by like 3:1 for multiple battles. What am I loving up?
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Dec 31, 2023 19:11
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Minenfeld! posted:Ok how in the ever loving gently caress does scaling work in UG:CW? I'm about to do Antietam and I've been outnumbered now by like 3:1 for multiple battles. What am I loving up? Scaling is based on how many men you have and how many brigades you have (and your difficulty) and also some other factors. You'll probably be outnumbered most of the game. The short version is that the enemy increases in size based on the size of your army (total not deployed), it also works differently for side and main battles. Here's a guide. https://forum.game-labs.net/topic/26142-hidden-mechanics-and-weapon-damage-degradation/ I would highly recommend the UI/AI mod. It's made by the same guy that made the above guide. It makes a lot of things in the game work more intuitively. In the base game, adding more men or artillery to a brigade can actually make them less effective. https://forum.game-labs.net/topic/25750-ui-and-ai-customizations-mod-v192/ The mod doesn't change scaling by default but there is an option to adjust enemy army sizes. I personally decided to just accept that I would be attacked by human waves of confederates in most battles. However, you can adjust enemy sizes before each battle to your taste. BearsBearsBears has issued a correction as of 22:00 on Dec 31, 2023 |
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Dec 31, 2023 20:43
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Minenfeld! posted:Ok how in the ever loving gently caress does scaling work in UG:CW? I'm about to do Antietam and I've been outnumbered now by like 3:1 for multiple battles. What am I loving up? it doesn't lol. The game falls into the pitfalls of the nerd criticisms of total war even harder.
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Dec 31, 2023 21:28
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I bought Panzer Campaigns Rzhev 42 (and Moscow 41) from the wargameDS sale and holy moly it is hard as balls trying to launch an offensive as the Soviets in 1942. Not only are the Germans dug in with minefields and bunkers (where they only had trenches defending around Kiev in 1943), but you have so much less artillery to work with. If you wait until the Landsers are disrupted by artillery fire before assaulting, it's going to take way too long because some turns you won't get any disruption results at all from how little indirect fire you have to parcel around and how resilient their fortifications are. That means you have to make direct assaults against undisrupted entrenched infantry, and that poo poo causes murderous casualties And then, once you finally do penetrate the front line, you don't have any goddamn reserves left to exploit the hole with. Its rough going, and it really gets you to empathize with more modern scholarship that the failure of Operation Mars (and the earlier post-Typhoon counteroffensive) was less about the Soviets being dumb and bad at war and more about them having to make do with very little resources and too many points of pressure needing attention to concentrate them properly.
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Jan 1, 2024 09:32
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Never got around to posting that Dominions stuff I planned to but I haven't given up. Here's a guide I wrote on basic army scripting some time ago, should give you a sense of what kind of stuff goes into planning Dominions turns: https://imgur.com/a/GjmODFV e: sidenote: I got a job offer as a copywriter for a VPN company as a consequence of one of their employees reading the above guide. Didn't follow up on it, but it just crossed my mind as a thing that happened. e2: click on pictures to zoom in, some stuff is a bit too blurry to see with imgur's default resolution my dad has issued a correction as of 19:45 on Jan 1, 2024 |
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Jan 1, 2024 19:43
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Neat guide. I'm also interested in what changes Dominions 6 has planned, compared to 4 and 5 which I have played. I really like the concept and scope of the games even though I never understood more than one or two nations and can barely beat the AI. I see a list here that has quite a few bullet points but I imagine things could still change in beta. https://steamcommunity.com/app/2511500/discussions/0/3807281445020039925/ e: Oh they are planning improved map generation? That would be most welcome, maps are important in a map game. e2: I also just realized this is getting released in a couple weeks so I can probably just read all about it then palindrome has issued a correction as of 21:17 on Jan 1, 2024 |
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Jan 1, 2024 21:13
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palindrome posted:Neat guide. I'm also interested in what changes Dominions 6 has planned, compared to 4 and 5 which I have played. I really like the concept and scope of the games even though I never understood more than one or two nations and can barely beat the AI. I'm not fond of the idea of adding glamour as a path type, I feel it ruins the symmetry of the existing 8 paths. Dominions 5 has 8 paths, 4 elemental and 4 sorcerous. The elemental paths are arranged very obviously with Air vs Earth and Fire vs Water. The sorcerous paths are also nicely arranged, although opposite crosspaths are pretty common. Nature and Death have a nice life vs death theme while Astral and Blood magic are the highest/most abstract magic vs the lowest/most visceral magic. Glamour just doesn't fit in with the way I've arranged the paths in my head.
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Jan 1, 2024 21:24
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The short version of it is that blood was always intended to be the "weird" path that doesn't fit with other kinds of magic, it's just finally fully implemented that way. All the "standard" magic originates from astral magic somewhere down the line before it adapted to the world, and then you have the magical potency of human life itself, independent from the ambient magic of the world, drawn from an unwilling victim, and greatly prized by the denizens of hell. It's not 'just' sorcery, it's something way worse and potentially way more powerful. While I don't like some parts of how glamour magic is implemented, it's genuinely an interesting complement to astral magic - both are ultimately magic of the otherworldly, but one is otherwordly in the sense of the cold, uncaring light of the stars, and the other is otherworldly in the sense of coming from a world of dreams (and nightmares). The glamour/astral combo is a far better representation of the sort of Lovercraftian insanity of R'Lyeh than astral alone was in 5. Implementing glamour is also thematically better than making every magical storyteller and weird fae spellweaving creature somehow also capable of throwing lightning at people (many of the things glamour does now like mirror images, mirages, etc were covered by air magic in 5) my dad has issued a correction as of 21:39 on Jan 1, 2024 |
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Jan 1, 2024 21:34
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my dad posted:The short version of it is that blood was always intended to be the "weird" path that doesn't fit with other kinds of magic, it's just finally fully implemented that way. All the "standard" magic originates from astral magic somewhere down the line before it adapted to the world, and then you have the magical potency of human life itself, independent from the ambient magic of the world, drawn from an unwilling victim, and greatly prized by the denizens of hell. It's not 'just' sorcery, it's something way worse and potentially way more powerful. Blood has always been a bit weird since it doesn't use gems, but all the magic paths were a bit weird. Astral is probably the second weirdest path, since it uses pearls instead of gems and you can (inefficiently) alchemize any kind of gems into astral pearls (and vice-versa). Plus all the cosmic horrors that you can summon through Astral. I always thought Astral and Blood were very well matched in terms of being opposing archetypes. The other weird path that I haven't mentioned is "Holy", which works completely differently than anything else. The way I would have done it if I needed to (not the actual game dev should care about that) is to make Glamour into a weird sub-path. Only some nations would get Glamour mages and the the appropriate illusion spells would be in the Glamour spell list as well as staying in Air or Astral or wherever they originally came from. This would represent a different understanding of magic than the pure 8 path system and could be later expanded to other weird subpaths for other specific groups of nations. Not sure what I would do about Glamour gems, maybe you can easily alchemize gems to Glamour gems if you have Glamour mages or maybe they can use multiple kinds of gems for Glamour magic (Air gems and Astral pearls for example). That would solve the problem of fae/storytellers being able to throw lightning while also letting Air magic keep their own illusions such as Fata Morgana. BearsBearsBears has issued a correction as of 22:12 on Jan 1, 2024 |
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Jan 1, 2024 22:05
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A lot of air/trickery association issues were resolved by basically just stapling glamour paths on top of already existing air paths where it makes sense (I'm looking at you, overpriced viking elves) or by making relevant spells and air/glamour crosspath. Wailing winds is now air/glamour instead of air/death, for example. The real dillema is what the call the new magic gems. Glam rocks? Glops (glamour opals)? Elf gems? Bowies (which admittedly is just glam rocks again)? e: As part of the new changes, MA Man now has nature/glamour crosspath as its main thing instead of nature/air. Remember the nature magic based choirs they get? The stuff that's comparable to sabbaths and communions, but is much safer and can't kill the mages participating? Yeah, witches singing high level glamour magics at you is flat loving terrifying, and with the Knights of Avalon finally becoming sacred, it's almost certainly going to be one of the most powerful nations of the age. my dad has issued a correction as of 22:16 on Jan 1, 2024 |
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Jan 1, 2024 22:12
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BearsBearsBears posted:Scaling is based on how many men you have and how many brigades you have (and your difficulty) and also some other factors. You'll probably be outnumbered most of the game. The short version is that the enemy increases in size based on the size of your army (total not deployed), it also works differently for side and main battles. Here's a guide. Thanks for this. I was getting kinda frustrated because I wasn't sure just what influenced what. Especially after a promising start where I completely annihilated the confederates at 1st bull run and had their reinforcements pinned into the corner they started from.
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Jan 1, 2024 22:23
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A number of newbie players are playing quick blitz games of Dominions5 since it's on a massive discount before the release of 6, and are asking for advice. I am politely shouting at so many people to "use your goddamn mages"  On the bright side, I also get to watch BIGGE FROGGE and their bat friends from Xibalba run over KNIGHTS OF THE CHALICE AND THE MOST HOLY INQUISITION OF MARIGNON and GOLEM CRAFTERS OF AGARTHA AND THEIR ETERNALLY LOYAL SHARD GUARD. This... isn't something you get to see every day. Making my old pretender design Bat and Toad Initiative shed a tear of joy. e: Mind you, I'm not the one playing them, just handing out advice. my dad has issued a correction as of 00:25 on Jan 2, 2024 |
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Jan 2, 2024 00:10
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FROGGE: BIGGE FROGGE:  BATMAN:  There's something about a bunch of stupid looking frogs and bats showing up in a game full of MOST ANCIENT MYSTICAL AND MAGICAL WARRIORS OF THE FAITH with stuff like Jotuns, lovecraftian bullshit, Daevas, Danavas, crusading knights, demons of the celestial bureaucracy, and whatnot, that just makes me like them way too much.
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Jan 2, 2024 00:25
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is this the only philosophy thread on this site?
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Jan 2, 2024 01:13
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Man UoC2 Kursk on normal handed me my first outright defeat in a while because I didn't realize until already behind schedule that a river was a major one and I'd have to get the HQ down there like three turns earlier to get the crossing.
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Jan 2, 2024 02:38
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my dad posted:There's something about a bunch of stupid looking frogs and bats showing up in a game full of MOST ANCIENT MYSTICAL AND MAGICAL WARRIORS OF THE FAITH with stuff like Jotuns, lovecraftian bullshit, Daevas, Danavas, crusading knights, demons of the celestial bureaucracy, and whatnot, that just makes me like them way too much. to be fair battletoads + batman is one of the more op teams i can think of
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Jan 2, 2024 06:36
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Cerebral Bore posted:to be fair battletoads + batman is one of the more op teams i can think of I would read that crossover
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Jan 2, 2024 06:53
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 Shortest scenario ever
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Jan 2, 2024 07:42
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so I went back and played Civ2 for a couple of hours lol I played on easiest difficulty and completed Apollo program by 0 AD turns out the trick to the game is to create 1 city that generates a zillion science points. Then use all your other cities to abuse caravans to aggregate production and for wonders and farm science/gold
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Jan 2, 2024 16:01
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Typo posted:so I went back and played Civ2 for a couple of hours lol How did you play it? It's not readily available on retail afaik?
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Jan 2, 2024 16:15
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gradenko_2000 posted:How did you play it? It's not readily available on retail afaik? MyAbandonWare lets you download it for free I had to look up a user patch for the version I downloaded (Test of Time) but after that it ran on Windows 10 fine
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Jan 2, 2024 16:19
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Typo posted:so I went back and played Civ2 for a couple of hours lol played (or well watch my friend play civ2) once, the leader creator was fun
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Jan 2, 2024 16:51
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The best parts of Civ2 are the advisor .fmvs and the throne room.
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Jan 2, 2024 21:12
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I remember the consensus for the longest time being civ 4 as the strongest civ and 3 as the weakest, tied with 1 though 1 is more a historical artifact then something people actively play nowadays. has there been a consensus of where 5 and 6 fit? I had 5 on launch which seriously turned me off it for a long time until I tried out vox populi which while it couldn’t fix some of 5’s fundamental flaws still put it in a pretty good place. I’ve been playing 6 on my phone and while I like a lot of the new systems introduced the ai doesn’t seem to be able to handle them and they’re also pretty back loaded into the late game which is especially a problem with how much easier 6 is since both games I played things were more or less decided by the renaissance and the remainder was just mopping up. didn’t get a chance to see global warming or anything
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Jan 2, 2024 22:24
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Is Civ2 the one where the cultural advisor is elvis because that is great.
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Jan 2, 2024 23:34
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FrancisFukyomama posted:I remember the consensus for the longest time being civ 4 as the strongest civ and 3 as the weakest, tied with 1 though 1 is more a historical artifact then something people actively play nowadays. I thought after the peak of 4, 5 was an interesting experiment that had some successes and some failures but everything I heard about 6 made it sound like they doubled down on its problems (especially making the AI even dumber)
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Jan 2, 2024 23:37
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Minenfeld! posted:Is Civ2 the one where the cultural advisor is elvis because that is great. yeah he becomes elvis in the modern era
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Jan 2, 2024 23:39
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FrancisFukyomama posted:I remember the consensus for the longest time being civ 4 as the strongest civ and 3 as the weakest, tied with 1 though 1 is more a historical artifact then something people actively play nowadays. Civ 1-4 are all the same game. You can easily compare them and figure and talk about what changes you liked and disliked. Civ 5 is a new game, you have to compare Civ 4 vs Civ 5 the same way you would compare SMAC and Civ 3. Civ 6 is once again a new game. Civ 4 is considered the best of the first 4 so you really only need to compare Civ 4, 5, and 6. Civ 4 is my favorite and I basically stopped playing the Civ series after that. I didn't like Civ 5 when I played it. It had some good stuff but also some awful stuff. The "One Unit Per Tile" (1UPT) system was a bad solution to a problem that was 80% solved in Civ 4. The terrible part was that they then made both the AI and the player automation unable to handle the 1UPT system. That was unforgivable for a game like Civ 5. I'm not sure if Civ 5 counts as a AAA game but it was certainly the biggest 4X game at that time. Civ 5 introduced Social Policies. You used your Culture resource to get special bonuses depending on which Social Policy tree you were going down. The Honor tree helps your military, the Piety tree helps your religion, etc. This is one of those things I wish I had to the skill to back-port to to Civ 4. What's the name for this sort of system? I think I've heard it called something like an "Orthogonal Advancement System" on youtube but I'm not finding examples of that phrase on the internet. Examples would be Traditions from Stellaris and Ideas from the EU series. Please name more examples if you can think of them. My definition would be that it has to be separate from the tech tree and provide non-linear advancement for your empire. Now that I think about, there is a similar system that vastly pre-dates Civ 5. In Sid Meier's Colonization (1994) your colonies would produce Liberty Bells and those would unlock Founding Fathers who would give nation bonuses depending on who you picked. It doesn't quite qualify because there was no separate tech tree in Colonization so this system basically replaced a traditional tech tree. I haven't played Civ 6. I know it added districts and such. I do want to note that they felt the need to start from first principles again. Fun Fact: In Civ 4 researching Fascism also unlocked Mount Rushmore. The lead designer of Civ 4, Soren Johnson, has (rightfully) defended this decision in interviews but I couldn't quickly find one. Creating a massive monument to a mythic past out of a mountain sacred to the peoples that you had to exterminate or subjugate in order to build your nation is the most fascist and most American thing I can think of. Anyway, here's Baba Yetu. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7CbZoyzOm0 BearsBearsBears has issued a correction as of 00:52 on Jan 3, 2024 |
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Jan 3, 2024 00:45
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CIV5 was good but the optimal strategy is very very linear
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Jan 3, 2024 01:10
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Typo posted:CIV5 was good but the optimal strategy is very very linear Yeah that was one of my problems with it, I get why they wanted to ditch sliders but making science a straight function of population made growth just the dominant strategy
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Jan 3, 2024 01:28
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BearsBearsBears posted:
https://www.designer-notes.com/ quote:Labels exist to separate and control people, and I wanted the civics system to encourage people to look past the labels and at the actual choices a society needs to make when governing itself. It was no accident that I attached Mt. Rushmore to Fascism; carving mammoth statues of your country’s leaders into a MOUNTAIN is fascist, even if we do not live under capital-F Fascism. Our own self-labeling as a Capitalist Democracy does not protect us from charges that our country is damaging the world when our policies hurt real people.
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Jan 3, 2024 03:19
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which Civ had the best AI?
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Jan 3, 2024 03:23
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FrancisFukyomama posted:I remember the consensus for the longest time being civ 4 as the strongest civ and 3 as the weakest, tied with 1 though 1 is more a historical artifact then something people actively play nowadays. my personal ranking is 4 is best, which is really just the culmination of 3, 2, and 1 followed by 6 and then 5 both of the latter civs are really hobbled by 1UPT being more gimmicky than anything else (IMO) and that it hurts the AI more than it helps, but 6 has a much better growth/development model compared to 5's difficult limits to growth based on happiness, and 6 is a lot more accessible both in terms of platform as well as mechanics
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Jan 3, 2024 03:26
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I agree with what other people are saying - Civs 1-4 are basically the same game evolving over time, and Civ4 is the peak of them. Civ 5-6 are a new, different style of game with significantly different mechanics - I think of 5-6 as being different versions of the 'new Civilization game', but I'm not going to argue with treating each as separate. Civ4 is my favorite, with Civ 6 behind it but pretty good, Civ 5 as 'not that great', and 1-3 as just older versions of 4. I think Old World is a better take on the Civ5-6 formula of cities that span multiple hexes, non-simple borders, and one unit per tile. While it only covers ancient to medieval times, that's the part of Civ4 and 6 that I generally enjoy the most and see the most interesting gameplay in. The scale and design of the map works well for 1 UPT, and pathfinding is good enough that humans can use automation and AIs can function pretty well. The order system cuts out the 'have to do fiddly moves for all of my huge number of units every turn', since you have a limited number of actions and it's often good to save some for critical turns. One thing where an older version stands out - the Civ2 advisors are simply great , especially the happiness advisor who goes from 'Elvis-like' to 'Actually Elvis' as you advance to the modern era. They're over-the-top, especially if you're watching all 20 minutes of their video at once, but more entertaining and more notable than the more subdued advisor advice they moved to. The links below are for compilations of the ancient, medieval, and modern civ2 advisor comments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlTIk80uBPg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFQDeYXq_iw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzHOhIdTpw0
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Jan 3, 2024 04:10
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civ 6’s economy seems a lot better than civ v’s. the districts are fun and there’s a bit of civ 4 in the growth mechanics. too bad about the DLL source not being released, it would have been a great base for a vox populi style mod
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Jan 3, 2024 04:24
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err posted:which Civ had the best AI? modded civ4
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Jan 3, 2024 05:11
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gradenko_2000 posted:my personal ranking is 4 is best, which is really just the culmination of 3, 2, and 1 not to mention civ 4 was the last civ game which was actually moddable The Rhye's and fall of civilization mod almost made it into a new game entirely, that sort of modding just doesn't happen with civ5/6
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Jan 3, 2024 05:12
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Typo posted:modded civ4 yeah there's this one Civ 4 mod whose name escapes me that had really good AI - like it could fight you to a straight military defeat on Warlord if you weren't careful (or maybe I'm just bad) EDIT: it's this one: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/k-mod-far-beyond-the-sword.407049/
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Jan 3, 2024 05:13
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