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Bloodly posted:You don't want to fight mission 3 on Titan regularly. I'm not even convinced you can. The 'initial attack' is something like 8 Hippikons, 4 Bull Minotaurs, a bunch of hoplites, and Shades. God knows if it keeps that up. I was going to bed when my Melth sense told me someone on the internet was saying winning was impossible in a strategy game. Here's me overrunning their super city that you're not even supposed to attack:  The whole place is bathed in green light because I've been massacring hundreds of their soldiers and dozens of the resulting shades.  And I've claimed the entire map and all 7 town centers without wiping out their docks.
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Jan 11, 2017 11:47
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Please tell me you got video of that.
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Jan 11, 2017 14:03
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That's incredible. And insane. Incredible insane. 
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Jan 11, 2017 15:20
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Deadmeat5150 posted:Please tell me you got video of that. Agreed, I'd like to see it. Poil posted:That's incredible. And insane. Incredible insane. I suspect hydras were involved. Lots of them.
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Jan 11, 2017 15:40
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Just wow. Thirding the hope for a video.
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Jan 11, 2017 17:15
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I accept the evidence given. But am still very much 'HOW?!".
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Jan 11, 2017 17:49
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It's a triviality compared to many of the later levels I'll be showing. I can win a frontal assault on Atlantis Reborn or Brokk's Journey, and even most of the titan LPers I've watched say that's impossible. Anyway, I played sloppily this time so it took me more than half an hour and I took a bunch of casualties. I bet I can do it in 20 minutes with under a dozen deaths including deletions. If I can, that may be sleek enough to actually be worth making a video of. Though I don't want to spend too much time on it instead of moving forward. These videos currently take me like 8 hours to make after the recording is done. Edit: just got 20 minutes in and then realized I wasn't actually recording. Melth fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Jan 11, 2017 |
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Jan 11, 2017 18:18
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Melth posted:It's a triviality compared to many of the later levels I'll be showing. I can win a frontal assault on Atlantis Reborn
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Jan 11, 2017 18:29
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Im looking forward to all the videos! I bashed my head against the campaign on Titan and made it through only with gallons of blood.
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Jan 11, 2017 18:48
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Glad to see another LP from you - you have an amazingly in-depth approach to these games. It's a shame that your FE LPs never made it to the archives.
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Jan 12, 2017 09:30
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Qrr posted:Glad to see another LP from you - you have an amazingly in-depth approach to these games. It's a shame that your FE LPs never made it to the archives. Thanks! I really need to actually edit those things and try to have them archived. It just ended up being such a nuisance to do the first one that I never got around to it since the thread got 'locked for archiving' and apparently there was no way to undo that. anilEhilated posted:Just wow. Thirding the hope for a video. So far I can't actually get a time substantially under half an hour, though I haven't been getting creative. I may try a new approach I thought up tomorrow morning and if I can get my time till I've claimed all settlements (or maybe just to enemy main base wipeout) to near 20 with that, I'll probably post a video of it with a little bit of commentary. Otherwise you'd just be looking at the kind of tactics you're going to see me do 20 times anyway, so there's not much point in taking time away from working on the next video or my other projects.
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Jan 12, 2017 10:19
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I wouldn't mind seeing bonus videos of you doing dumb stuff like that in other missions. Are you capable of destroying the base in the last Atlantis mission?
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Jan 12, 2017 22:02
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SirSamVimes posted:I wouldn't mind seeing bonus videos of you doing dumb stuff like that in other missions. Are you capable of destroying the base in the last Atlantis mission? Yeah, it's easy for me. Heck, the AI is dumb enough that with a bit of micro you can destroy it while Kronos is in it. People hoping for a Scratching the Surface redo posted:You wiped out the enemy base? HOW?! I've run into like 7 different problems ruining my attempts to get a good recording of overrunning the enemy's super base on Scratching the Surface, and my best time to complete enemy annihilation is now 24 minutes. Which still feels very sloppy honestly, but I'm bored of the level. I need to work on making the next video instead. But there's not much to show anyway. I tried various creative and/or micro-intensive strategies to get my time down. For example, I tried taking my starting force to the northwest dock while my town center builds, microing a single Toxotes to lure away the entire defenders, then using my transport ship to jump the rest of the starting force past the wall to tear down the first Dock. The idea was to kill the Dock within 2 minutes, then use Agamemnon's reinforcements (which include Petroboli) to immediately attack the main base. Didn't work though. Even microing it perfectly, the enemy towers and town center will kill your force before you kill the Dock. So ultimately the straightforward, boring, conventional way is the way to go. There's basically no enemy resistance on this mission. The only challenge is the first wave, which is like 10 Hoplites, 8 Hippikons, 2 Minotaurs, and 2 Shades or so. And it comes about 7-8 minutes in, so you have time to get ready. Interestingly, the Hippikons often arrive about 30 seconds after the rest, which just makes it easier. The other waves often include some big myth units (including bunches of Colossi, which they apparently cheat to have since they aren't in the mythic age) and more Hippikons, but they're slow enough and small enough that it's really easy to beat them. Here's an outline of my procedure: 1) Set up town quickly as shown but build a stronger economy. 4) Get to classical (Ares I guess, but it doesn't matter) after about 16-18 total villagers/fishing ships, then mass Toxotes out of two Archery Ranges 5) Await the enemy just north of the gold mine. With your starting force tanking for ever-growing number of Toxotes, you can easily hold out forever 6) Build a REALLY big economy and get to Heroic (Aphrodite if you're skillful, Dionysus if not) to get Petroboli. Get all upgrades, keep enlarging your army, etc. 7) Your heroes, plus about 40 Toxotes, plus about 5-7 Petroboli are enough to easily overrun the super base. If your micro isn't good, first use a few Petroboli and Toxotes to crush the light defenses at the 3 outlying settlements, build Town Centers there, and use the extra population room to build a truly enormous army before beginning your attack. Melth fucked around with this message at 13:15 on Jan 13, 2017 |
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Jan 13, 2017 13:11
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I've encountered some kind of technical problem that's been making it impossible to make the next video. It all seems to have started when my computer crashed a few days ago. It was erratic and really slow for about a day after that and a couple of times froze up badly enough that I eventually had to do a forced shut down. After trying a bunch of stuff I was eventually able to do a reset about a day ago, which improved things somewhat. The computer is sometimes back up to seemingly full functionality, but sometimes still suddenly slows to a crawl. And Dxtory in particular now often drops to an unplayable 7 FPS when recording, or freezes AoM up entirely. Yet other times it runs normally, like it always did before. I actually did get a recording of the whole mission which I scrapped because I thought I could play it better. Probably relatedly, Dxtory's write speed benchmark test sometimes indicates 70+ or so, but sometimes instead goes as slow as 6. If anyone has a suggestion of something to try that would be excellent, whether it's a setting change that would make recording less strenuous for the computer or a way to diagnose the problem. Edit: I was up all night trying different workarounds (my best idea now is to forget Dxtory entirely for this mission and try to record it with Shadowplay while also running Audacity to record what I say, then try to edit those together later since Shadowplay can't split audio). Nothing worked because the game kept crashing at different random times. Once I had done a perfect run and was in the last couple of minutes. In short, there is no way I'm actually going to have this done on Monday. Melth fucked around with this message at 11:54 on Jan 16, 2017 |
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Jan 16, 2017 07:30
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Have you tried doing post-commentary? Saves you the audacity hassle and it lowers the load on your system when playing.
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Jan 16, 2017 17:43
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Did your computer get moved/knocked over? Did you run any updates to your OS or operating system? Did you run a virus/malware scan (I recommend malware-bytes)? Did you update any software?
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Jan 17, 2017 07:48
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Consider using OBS to record a video as well, you can record live with it just as easily.
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Jan 17, 2017 22:32
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Troy proved to be a less formidable foe than my computer's several crashes, new software problems, and my treacherous mouse , but I overcame them all in the end. In this video, I squeezed in a lot of useful information. There's still tons and tons of stuff to talk about in this game, so I've still got a lot of basic topics to explain. If anyone has any particular questions about how the game works, do let me know and I'll make sure to bring them up soon. As with the last mission, my strategy this time is very tricky and complex and relies on precise timing, but the reward is a swift and spectacularly lopsided victory. On the run I recorded, I played so close to perfectly that I actually shaved a whole minute off my own erstwhile best time. That was awesome after having to watch so many good runs up till then be ruined by a crash or other problem at the very last minute. Here's the updated version which fixes the audio desync: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgPV4ZMXs7s I had to use a completely different set of software and editing process this time since the old programs and methods kept causing crashes or otherwise not working. I'd like to know how you guys think this video came out in comparison. As always, I'd also like to know what you think I'm doing well and what I need to improve on. Melth fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Jan 19, 2017 |
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Jan 18, 2017 04:33
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Video seems fine. I really liked the unit comparison and stat discussions.
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Jan 18, 2017 04:52
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Impressive play! That was great fun. I'm glad that someone else appreciate's Odysseus' voice actor. The audio got desynched by the end though. Both your voice and the sound effects were several seconds ahead of the game on screen. Re: Agamemnon's general terribleness. One of the central themes of the Iliad is the question of who should rule. On the one hand, you have Agamemnon, who comes from a line of kings given their scepter by Zeus himself (never mind the last few generations of the house of Atreus have been rife with child murder, cannibalism, and blasphemy). On the other, we have Achilles, who is literally the greatest human being ever due to a complex number of mythological reasons that boil down to Zeus being fundamentally unable to keep it in his pants, even if it means the end of his divine rule. But because Agamemnon came from the right womb, he gets to be the high king, and Achilles has to do what he says. This, obviously, makes Achilles deeply unhappy with the order of things. This conflict over who should rule, the most able man or the 'lawful' claimant, is never truly resolved. Agamemnon eats some crow and makes a pretty speech about how he is the Eurystheus to Achilles' Herakles (aka the lovely loser who nevertheless calls the shots), but that's not what really gets Achilles back into the fight. Portrayals of the Iliad generally go whole hog on making Agamemnon either a joke (here) or an outright villain (the abominable movie Troy). This isn't just a modern thing; in Athenian dramas -- written centuries after the Iliad -- he's generally a total prick. See Ajax or Clytemnestra (in the latter, Agamemnon is such a nasty guy, he makes a female character who commits unspeakable crimes nevertheless heroic). While such versions are based in the text of the Iliad, I feel that there is more to his character. Within the context of Greek culture and the wider mythology, Agamemnon has understandable reasons to do things like refuse to give up his concubine, even if a priest of Apollo is asking very nicely. Most of his actions in the poem come not from malevolence (contrast: Achilles), but either out of wounded pride and (and this is just my reading) of the feeling that he has sacrificed more than anyone else on this whole campaign. He killed his own daughter to get here, gosh darn it, so he should get first share of the glory. And, needless to say, he was not a wimp who "forgot his spear" as the bio of his Age of Mythology version amusingly states. Like every major character in the poem, Agamemnon busts plenty of heads. He's just overshadowed by Achilles, Ajax, Diomedes, and the rest of the Greeks.
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Jan 18, 2017 05:27
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Sound seems to get desynced from the video at some point in. It's not too big of a concern since it doesn't heavily detract from the action but it was noticeable.
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Jan 18, 2017 06:35
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I thought the Atlantans curried favour from Posideon, not Hermes.
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Jan 18, 2017 07:52
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Wow, that Helepolis really lived up to its name. The videos only keep getting more impressive.
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Jan 18, 2017 10:04
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I really enjoy watching you break this game over your knee. 
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Jan 18, 2017 11:08
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Samovar posted:I thought the Atlantans curried favour from Posideon, not Hermes. You'll be able to drop Tartarus through some plot holes by the end, I wouldn't worry about it.
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Jan 18, 2017 13:15
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As for Cyzicus appearing, yeah, it wasn't founded by Milesian settlers until the 7th century BC. King Cyzicus appears in the Argonautica as the King of the Doliones, but none of that's in the Homeric epics.
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Jan 18, 2017 13:20
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Orv posted:You'll be able to drop Tartarus through some plot holes by the end, I wouldn't worry about it. Sorry, poor attempt at a joke considering how fast the mission went.
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Jan 18, 2017 13:56
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Yeah, that was a bit too sophisticated. The fact Hermes is a pretty lovely minor god doesn't help either.
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Jan 18, 2017 14:07
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I kind of like getting a cut-rate junior hero as a helper. Odysseus was really more of an expert sneaksguy than a killer anyway, right?
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Jan 19, 2017 06:59
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Glazius posted:I kind of like getting a cut-rate junior hero as a helper. Odysseus was really more of an expert sneaksguy than a killer anyway, right? I mean there's the bit in the odessy where he locks a few score men in his ballroom and almost singlehandedly slaughters them if memory serves. Although I think they were unarmed? Like Odysseus was sneaky sure, but if I remember he was still a kick rear end warrior of note.
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Jan 19, 2017 08:29
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TheCog posted:I mean there's the bit in the odessy where he locks a few score men in his ballroom and almost singlehandedly slaughters them if memory serves. Although I think they were unarmed? To be fair those were a bunch of noble slobs looking to stick their dicks in his wife, not battle-hardened Trojans, and IIRC Odysseus was getting help from his son.
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Jan 19, 2017 08:41
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quote:And, needless to say, he was not a wimp who "forgot his spear" as the bio of his Age of Mythology version amusingly states. The bio doesn't say 'forgot'. It says 'lost'. The fact that he can still beat the hell out of people with decent damage unarmed speaks well of him. His damage is listed as 8 base. Ajax with his giant mace is 10. Arkantos is 9.
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Jan 19, 2017 11:16
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CommissarMega posted:To be fair those were a bunch of noble slobs looking to stick their dicks in his wife, not battle-hardened Trojans, and IIRC Odysseus was getting help from his son. Having Athena on his side didn't hurt either (as always, see the foot race in Book XXIII of the Iliad, complete with comedy poo moment!) . Odysseus doesn't do badly in the Iliad's murderbowl stakes either - the fourth deadliest Greek hero after Diomedes, Patroklos and Achilles.
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Jan 19, 2017 12:58
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Computer adventures continue! After a day and a half of trying different things to solve the audio-visual desync (Which I eventually figured out was caused by VIrtualDub), I finally resolved it with a different program. I went to bed with Zarx encoding the fixed video to an MKV so I could upload it... and woke up to a system diagnostics screen warning me my hard drive had failed and no operating system was detected. A restart seems to have resolved this completely, but I think you'll understand that I'm taking that with a grain of salt. This isn't any kind of practical crisis for me because I have an old computer I can fall back on and because I've backed things up religiously ever since I almost lost my 2200 line epic poem last summer, but it might get in the way of updating on schedule. We'll see. On the positive side, yesterday was totally awesome.
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Jan 19, 2017 14:25
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Sounds like you should consider replacing the hard drive. But I think you can run some check or scanning program(s) to see if it's faulty. 
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Jan 19, 2017 15:09
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Astroclassicist posted:Having Athena on his side didn't hurt either (as always, see the foot race in Book XXIII of the Iliad, complete with comedy poo moment!) . Yeah, Odysseus is the sneaky, subtle guy by the standards of epic Greek heroes. He can still mow down dozens of men before breakfast.
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Jan 19, 2017 15:18
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Smiling Knight posted:Yeah, Odysseus is the sneaky, subtle guy by the standards of epic Greek heroes. He can still mow down dozens of men before breakfast. All in all, I think he's the most "modern" hero of the lot, one it's actually possible to sympathize with. He does his share of dickery but when all is said and done he's mostly concerned about getthing this whole thing over with as soon as he can and going home.
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Jan 19, 2017 16:01
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Melth posted:Computer adventures continue! You might want to check you hard drive's SMART status to see if it is actually dying. Here's a good list of monitoring tools, including free ones. And, like Poil said, you should really look into replacing the drive soon.
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Jan 19, 2017 17:54
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Technowolf posted:You might want to check you hard drive's SMART status to see if it is actually dying. Here's a good list of monitoring tools, including free ones. Thanks, yeah, that was one of the first things I checked about a week ago. SMART status checks and other tests still say everything is fine. The diagnostics screen yesterday was the first acknowledgement from the computer that anything was wrong at all, even though it was the seventh crash in a week. I've tried every diagnostic trick and method I know, so I think tomorrow I'll take the computer in to Best Buy to get someone more knowledgeable than me to look at it. I got my current hard drive from them less than six months ago when the previous one died, so it might well still be covered under warranty. That would be convenient. It also seems that one or more of the programs I've been using to make this LP is part of the problem. I'm going to try to avoid Dxtory and Zarx264Gui in particular. I also have my suspicions about this video editing software ShotCut I just started using yesterday so I could avoid the problematic VirtualDub. ShotCut has been a big improvement in speed and a few other things now that I've figured out the initially strange interface, but last night (and then again this morning) it seemed to cause a crash when I was trying to export the finished version of the video. I'm actually testing one theory about that right this second and am 85% done. Edit: It worked! Here's the updated version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgPV4ZMXs7s Melth fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Jan 19, 2017 |
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Jan 19, 2017 20:11
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anilEhilated posted:That's really it - the standards. Can't be a Greek hero unless you're a mass murderer (and nobleborn or a god's offspring but that's a different matter). That being said, Odysseus is an interesting character because while he does his fair share of slaughtering people, he shows some reluctance since he didn't want to be there in the first place. Hell, he even tried to cheat the draft delegation by feigning madness. His heroism at the field of battle seems like a token effort, something that has to be there - but the primary characteristic is that he's smart, something rather uncommon in mythology. In the Iliad itself, there is this interesting tension between Odysseus' reluctance to be there in the first place, and yet his seeming loyalty to the cause once he's there. He's the one who cows the mutinying men, he's the one who gets Agamemnon not to abandon the fight, and he is one of the trio sent to convince Achilles to rejoin the fight.
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Jan 19, 2017 21:05
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