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Cythereal posted:Until you get to the Norse campaign, at least. The Norse are all about blood for the blood gods and sneer at concepts like "strong defenses." I find that on Titan difficulty defense is essential in the Norse campaign, at least on a lot of the missions. I would characterize my usual strategy on serious campaign missions as 'aggressive defense'. I rush out to smash a few enemy groups before they're ready and lay claim to key territories, but then focus hard on defense at my newer, better borders. anilEhilated posted:Fixed that. I too have a deep loathing for elves of all kinds! Smiling Knight posted:One nice little thing in Scratching the Surface is that the Armor of Achilles relic can always be found outside the walls of Troy. I never knew about that; that's great! And thanks for recounting the rest of that myth; I was hoping to but barely even had time to squeeze in a mention that Ajax is supposed to be dead. anilEhilated posted:Well drat. That was fast. It's called Heroic Fleet and it makes ships do +50% damage. Which is still mostly worthless given how huge myth unit armor and HP is and how cheap they are compared to other ships even. The reason I didn't mention it though is that it doesn't actually exist in the vanilla game. It was added in the expansion to fix there being no counters to Scyllas and Krakens and so forth. But it's just not good enough for that purpose.
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Jan 10, 2017 20:12
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Bloodly posted:A ways back, but...aren't Heroes entirely immune to most myth units effects? Like they will not trigger no matter what? Almost! Most myth unit effects will not activate when targeted on heroes. But the area of effect ones CAN affect heroes if you activate them on a human soldier standing right next to the hero or whatever. Not that this usually matters since the damage will be greatly reduced and such.
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Jan 10, 2017 22:05
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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I was just rereading some of the Iliad (which I hate, by the way, but nevermind that right now) and was surprised to come across a scene in book XXIII where Odysseus and mega-Ajax wrestle... and their strength is evenly matched. It's a draw for so long that the crowd gets bored. Then Odysseus kinda cheats but it turns out that he isn't strong enough to hoist mega-Ajax over his head (not that that's even relevant normally, but Ajax wanted to settle the tie that way). Achilles officially decides it's a tie in the end. So that seems to establish canonically that Odysseus is tied for one of the top spots -possibly the top spot- as strongest Greek, and is stronger than Ajax for his size because Ajax is huge and he's not. In the Odyssey of course he never gets compared to any of these other great heroes directly, but he's stated again and again to have superhuman strength. He shows that a few times along the way of course, then there's the famous bow scene where Penelope says she'll marry whoever can string Odysseus's bow which no other man on earth is strong enough to do. And sure enough the most fearsome of the suitors can't even come close. Odysseus's son Telemachus has to try really hard but he's eventually able to. Then Odysseus just does it like it's nothing.
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Jan 20, 2017 00:22
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Poil posted:You do need a lot of muscle strength to draw a bow properly. So naturally most games makes it entirely dependent on dexterity/agility. I think it's because most modern archery is about hitting a tiny, stationary target, rather than about hitting a very large but moving target with enough force to punch through armor and redecorate the innards. One is all about good eyes, steady hands, and good physics intuition (with strength being nice for determining maximum distance and influencing how high up you need to aim, but little else). The other requires great strength above all, with everything else secondary because accurately hitting a person with small remaining force is worthless. And so is missing because your arrow was slow and therefore missed when the fellow moved an unexpected way during the intervening time. Also in part because modern compound bows have enough mechanical advantage that even a fairly weak person can fire an arrow with considerable force anyway. We think we understand archery because we still have sport archery, so we don't do as much actual research as we might about topics that seem more alien. But modern sport archery is not at all the same thing.
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Jan 20, 2017 01:12
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Astroclassicist posted:Whoa Whoa Whoa. Hold it right there. I can understand rating the Odyssey above the Iliad or the like, but hating it?! As it turns out, I rate the Iliad slightly below staring idly into space for three hours while waiting to find out if I'll actually get to do jury duty this time. This was a surprise to me. I brought it along because I thought I rated it slightly above staring into space and that therefore this would be a good chance to make myself read it again.
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Jan 20, 2017 03:05
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So to ask the old question again since I once again have a totally different process and the specs for the final version of the video are different as well, do the quality of the sound and video compare well to the previous ones in this series?
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Jan 20, 2017 06:27
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Simply Simon posted:Homer's mashing loving action figures together going "Odysseus could totally beat Achilles if he had enough time to plan!" This is the best description of the Iliad I've ever read. Oddly enough though, I think I actually would have liked more action figure mashing in Argonautica. That story begged for it since it was a giant crossover of Greek mythology's greatest hits. And also Greek mythology's random guys with lame powers who nobody likes. But instead everyone including Jason immediately agrees that Heracles is the best at everything and should lead them all. And then the Hellenic Superfriends mostly just sit around not using their powers while Medea joins the party and does everything. Melth fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Jan 21, 2017 |
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Jan 21, 2017 01:51
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TheKingofSprings posted:One thing that's neat about this game is that if one of your heroes drops you can kill them forever by putting a building over their corpse. Carbon dioxide posted:Just caught up. Enjoying the LP so far. I tl;dr all the effort posts in this thread so I hope you find some time in the videos to talk about the weirder quirks of this game. Yes, I just tested it. Sadly, it doesn't matter though. First, the campaign AI rarely builds new stuff except in a few scripted spots and for that matter rarely even rebuilds stuff in their base. So they're not going to delete one of your fallen heroes. And you can't really do it to them either although I can think of 6 total missions in all of the campaigns where you get to kill special heroes. In two of the missions I can think of, killing the hero immediately wins the mission. Then there's one weird mission of the original campaign where you kill some special heroes as basically a playable cinematic, but you have no villagers and thus no way to build. Then there's this one sloppily made mission of the Chinese campaign where you're not supposed to but you CAN seek out and kill an enemy special hero. But again you have no villagers. There IS one mission in the original campaign where you can optionally and trivially kill a special hero right next to the actual target you need to kill to win, and I guess you COULD smuggle a villager up into the heart of that enemy base to build over him in theory, but the mission is basically done anyway. The only case where 1) you can kill a special hero without the mission being over and 2) you have villagers is the sloppy final level of the Chinese campaign. There a weak enemy hero will go on a suicide attack against your base in the first few minutes. Which makes it easy to build over him I guess, but since the enemy makes no attempt to rescue him he's not coming back anyway. Oh! Come to think of it, if you play the very first mission very badly on Titan difficulty, Arkantos's son Kastor can get killed up on that cliff he starts on. He's an ally rather than an enemy but not actually under your control. I guess if you had stashed a villager up in Atlantis for this purpose and if you held back from using your giant army of reinforcements to win, you could delete Kastor. That'll teach him to want to go to Troy with his dad. Melth fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Jan 21, 2017 |
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Jan 21, 2017 22:17
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VIDEO UP! SHIFT KEY DOWN! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJmn_HVHlVo Melth fucked around with this message at 08:22 on Jan 24, 2017 |
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Jan 24, 2017 04:40
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my dad posted:It's generally a good idea not to edit in important things into your posts (unless it's the OP) since nobody gets an update when you edit stuff, just when stuff gets posted. Thanks for the tip; I wasn't sure how passionate people were about not double posting and decided not to risk it. Dinictus posted:
Right! That's why I kept mentioning my heroes regenerate and therefore tanking with them. You would think a hydra of all things would too, but they don't. Which is a reason I kept saying they're only good if you can start them off fighting small groups who won't hurt them too bad. That way you can get extra heads WITHOUT being one shot from death. It's also why I saved my Restoration power forever ultimately, I was always waiting for a good chance to use it on several hydras since they're one of the best imaginable targets. Healing is quite rare in this game and it's very possible to have none available at all. Especially as the Greeks. I think I'll save a complete listing of all types of healing (and information about their speed) for later missions, but HannibalBarca got almost all of them. The Chinese basically have Priests (called Monks) who cost the exact same as a Priest, are bought from the same building, and heal at the same rate. That really takes away the specialness of Egypt having the only guaranteed access to healing. Worthlessly, they also have a myth unit that heals nearby allies slightly when it dies. Oh and Tale of the Dragon added 1 new unit for all civilizations, most patching a giant hole in their capabilities. The Greeks got the Physician, giving them a dedicated healer. I really don't like that honestly.
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Jan 24, 2017 15:56
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Lynneth posted:Besides Hephaestos' thingamajig there, is there any other way to get access to wood or gold after they've run out? Several! All resources are basically unlimited in this game. The game is more about maximizing your income than hoarding limited wealth. Besides that farming and fishing are infinite, so is caravan gold. And, in fact, caravans can generate gold at a very fast rate if your route is long enough and you have the Coinage upgrade. On this mission where my market was much too close to the town center, they'd still have been as good as villagers with all upgades. If I'd built a new market at the edge of the map along the same line I'd have made about 50 gold per trip more at the cost of only a few more seconds. Chinese Pixiu myth units generate gold while fighting (but they cost gold, and my tests indicate they usually only recoup about 1/2 their price before they die, so...) The Ship of Fingernails relic for food and Ring of the Nibelungs for gold also grant infinite trickles of those resources. For all trees to run out would be almost inconceivable on most maps, but I suppose it could on some of the desert ones that just have few to begin with. There isn't another way to just harvest infinite amounts of wood like with farming or caravans, but besides Hephaestus's Plenty Vault there are Chinese Gardens. Those basically work like mini-Plenty Vaults but only on one resource at a time. The Gaia's Forest god power can of course create more trees, but you'll run out of that eventually too. And then of course you can endlessly (but expensively) use your Market to transmute one resource into another, like Orv said.
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Jan 24, 2017 20:11
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Technowolf posted:Don't units garrisoned in building regenerate very slowly, or am I thinking of another Age game? Virtually nothing ever regens in this game. Even heroes don't outside the campaign. Extended Edition MASSIVELY buffed the few sources of regen that did exist though. Like they're all twice as good. Here are most or all of them: Odin's human soldiers and only Odin's human soldiers regenerate. The rate was originally really slow and even worse in combat, which you should try to be in all the time as Norse, so I didn't find that very worthwhile. Particularly because Odin and only Odin among the Norse has no access to Forseti with his awesome mass-healing permanent god power. Now though the rate is actually a noticeable 1.5/second. Most human soldiers have <100 HP, so one minute will take a guy from critically injured to full. That's pretty great. Combined with actually getting his ravens in Archaic now for THE best scouting in the game, I might actually play Odin over Loki. Behemoths did at 1/second, which is useless. You'd need to wait 5 minutes for the thing to heal up if it was even half dead. In Tale of the Dragon they buffed the regen rate to 2/second which is still lousy. Especially because it's almost impossible to get the slow guys back out of a fight alive. As Atlanteans the otherwise lousy (but ALL the Heroic age Atlantean gods kind of suck, so he can be viable) minor god Hyperion can grant a regen rate of 1.5/second to heroes only. Now it's 2.5. That's major regeneration and it will be awesome in the campaign. In multiplayer it will be nice since the heroes are expensive but squishy and are most enemies' favorite targets. And as Atlanteans the rather bad Hecate can grant 2/second regen for myth units. This is pretty small considering their oodles of hitpoints, but it's still solid in absolute terms and their generally good armor means every hitpoint goes further. Or it would be except that most Atlantean myth units are horrible. It IS the only way in the game to heal a Titan, so bragging rights there. Still, I don't think I'd ever willingly pick Hecate over Helios and I don't even really like her better than Atlas considering that Atlas is the only Atlantean god that grants a town or army-wrecker power. This reminds me that a lot of changes were made in the Extended Edition and some of what I've been saying only applied in previous versions.
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Jan 24, 2017 23:09
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I've been trying to figure this out on various BBCode sites but haven't found an answer yet so far. Is there a way to make my table of contents prettier by having the youtube links look like the chapter titles?.
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Jan 26, 2017 01:17
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Excellent, thank you both of you. I had an amazingly awesome idea for the next chapter, but alas my plans seem to have been foiled pre-emptively. I'll have to come up with something merely startlingly awesome instead.
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Jan 26, 2017 04:50
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I just torched Troy in a frontal assault, no horse needed.
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Jan 29, 2017 05:39
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Lunethex posted:I take it minotaurs were involved in this For the finishing blow, yeah. Manticores did most of the hard work. anilEhilated posted:...Could we turn this into the new thread title? Tempting! Is that actually possible? Samovar posted:Horses? Horses!? We don't need no stinkin' horses! Did you ever see UHF? Edward_Tohr posted:But I thought you needed cavalry to perform rescue chains? What? I taught you guys better than that! Like 50% of my first-turn moves on any given Fire Emblem chapter are infantry rescue chains to score small but critical amounts of free movement! Smiling Knight posted:Ooooooh boy I can't wait. I actually have something arguably even cooler planned for the 'official' run of this mission. I do have some screenshots and several clips of the storming Troy directly run, but it's a really long battle, so I think it's best left to an edited-down side video or something.
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Jan 29, 2017 22:49
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The new video is 1) Finished 2) On time 3) Awesome 4) Thumbnailed with a new logo 5) Posted here for you to watch and then lavish praise upon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cINsV49pmCA
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Jan 30, 2017 21:29
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anilEhilated posted:Yeah, it's an amazing case of personal beef-based metaphysics. Dante was a rather spiteful person. Well it's half that, but a lot of it just seems to be a weird mashup of B-list Greek mythological figures in Hell for no reason. Capaneus makes it all worthwhile though.
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Jan 31, 2017 23:31
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Glazius posted:It's interesting hearing you talk and seeing you demonstrate the precise food and worker strategies to speedrun. I think that's three people now who thought the way they came up with the horse was a problem with the script. I never had an issue with it myself so I'm curious what you guys think is wrong with it. To me the silly part was always the Trojan horse itself. Like most of Odysseus's 'clever' ideas it always struck me as both needlessly complex and completely dependent on luck. The ultimate in 'blind' luck in his plans was of course introducing himself to Polyphemus as 'nobody'. There are so many levels on which that shouldn't have helped at all, but even if we're willing to pretend that it was perfectly plausible that the other Cyclops would really fall for it and ask no further questions when the screaming Polyphemus said "nobody is killing me", a bigger problem remains. Any other cry for help either more or less coherent would have doomed the lot of them! A simple "help, help!" or "He's killing me" for example. Or just wordless screaming and thrashing about. Or "nobody and his men are killing me!" And especially "The strong-greaved Achaeans who brought their hollow ships over the wine-dark sea are killing me with sharp bronze." Now of course it was actually sharp wood, but he was blind and had no way of knowing that and my first guess if a bunch of armed men stabbed me in the eye would probably be that they used their weapons rather than a random log from the fire (and also I couldn't think of an epithet Homer used for wood).
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Feb 1, 2017 03:54
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:
Those have a far longer and far more ignominious history! White Coke posted:I thought the other cyclops (cyclopses ?) I believe (and I'm only saying this because you asked, not because I actually want to be pedantic about this) that the Greek plural would have been cyclopes. Also, I believe all Greek Cs were pronounced like Ks, so it's kyklopes. I've been rather inconsistent about pronunciations and pluralizations throughout this whole LP anyway. Nissin Cup Nudist posted:My favorite bit is Dante feuding with Pope Boniface VIII IRL, and woops, hey, how'd he get in the eight circle of hell? One of my favorite bits of Machiavelli is in Discourses on Livy where he's like, "It's true we Italians don't take Christianity very seriously. You wouldn't either if you lived next to the pope!"
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Feb 1, 2017 19:02
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anilEhilated posted:I said it before, it comes out of nowhere. There's no relation between the previous dialogue and Arkantos babbling about horses. Iirc in the original story horses were the emblem of Troy and that was the reason that particular animal was chosen. AoM could have gone with that explanation I suppose, but fundamentally I think the part that came out of nowhere is not the choice of animal but the whole idea of deciding to sneak into the city by climbing inside a giant wooden thing and hoping the Trojans move it into the city without question in the first place. One plus side of doing things the way AoM did is that it let them develop the setting of Atlantis a bit more. They do build off the idea of horses being important symbols in Atlantean culture a fair amount later, especially in unit descriptions for Atlantean stuff. The only thing I don't like about it is that I think Odysseus should have been the originator of the idea. Smiling Knight posted:While of course it "Nobody is killing me" is contrived, it worked for me because it is appropriate for Odysseus myth-wise. By that I mean, in contrast with the other Homeric heroes, Odysseus is willing (to a degree) to obscure his heroic nature -- see also his beggar disguise, which you wouldn't catch someone like Ajax dead in. Therefore, the Cyclopes episode is another incidence of Odysseus' willingness to break from heroic norms serving helping him. I think you're giving Homer too much credit here. Odysseus is completely inconsistent about whether to unhelpfully boast of or unhelpfully hide his heroic nature -and for that matter he usually only does things like disguise himself as a beggar because a god literally flies down and tells him to and even puts the disguise on him. I just think that not only the Homeric Greeks but ancient people in general were terrible at writing clever trickster characters.
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Feb 2, 2017 20:15
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Smiling Knight posted:That certainly could be the case. As Great Works of Western Canon (tm), the Homeric epics are given the benefit of the doubt most of the time, maybe more than they should be. To try and prop up Homer though, I would say that Odysseus is a transitional figure. He still has the same desires as any other hero -- fame most of all -- but is clever enough to know that you can't always just announce who you are. So he hides when he thinks its necessary (Cyclopes, Phaeacians, Ithaca with divine prodding) but the second he thinks he can get away with it, he gets some bragging in. Fair enough I suppose Qrr posted:
Bear in mind that many of those units are merely mostly worthless in multiplayer of course. They have a niche role which is better than nothing. Interestingly to me as a game designer, this problem in the campaign (and some other issues in the campaign for that matter) originate from intelligent attempts at good game design. The reason these specialized units are worthless in the campaign is that they would only be worthwhile if the enemy massed a single unit. In which case one could just mass the counter and run them over without even thinking. That would be lousy gameplay, and in fact in this thread we already mocked the one mission where that happens. Essentially, the AI can't always play scissors because then we'd always play rock. The solution Ensemble came up with was to have the AI almost always make balanced armies of 1/3 rock, 1/3 scissors, and 1/3 paper. There's only one problem: this isn't actually a solution at all. They probably thought it would make the player build 1/3 each too. But that's a draw. You know what else is a draw? Pure rock. Except that that has several net advantages: we don't need to spend as much on upgrades or production buildings and micro is easier. There's a further problem. In theory pure paper or pure scissors or any mix of them would be just as good, but we're not actually playing rock-paper-scissors here. Some of these unit types are more feasible to use than others. For example, the Greeks cannot mass heroes. At most they can make 4. They have by far the easiest time massing myth units though. The Egyptians and Atlanteans cannot mass myth units in a feasible amount of time. On some missions the Norse can't do so at all. And among human soldier types, archers turn out to have several critical advantages over cavalry and infantry. The result is that we often end up with pure rock simply being the best strategy and with most unit types being inefficient or outright worthless- despite Ensemble trying to encourage more varied armies. Most of the obvious solutions have issues of their own. Make the enemy use just 2 unit types? This is actually an interesting idea. The result is that a one-unit mass of a particular type will enjoy a very big advantage, but at least the human has to think a second to figure out what unit that would be. And one could easily rotate the two types the AI uses chapter by chapter so that eventually the player has a chance to use just about everything. Still, any individual level will be fairly trivial once you know what to make. Make the enemy use different, pre-defined waves? Now you have guess-and-check gameplay. Make the enemy use random waves? Now you have luck-based gameplay AND no incentive not to just mass rock and hope for the best. Make the enemy counter what the player uses? Well alright, but you either have to have the AI cheat to know what the player might have been building in the fog- which will frustrate people- or you can have the AI just counter whatever the human used the most of in recent battle. That would be fairly interesting, but it just means a smart human will use a bit of paper in a skirmish, then mass rock to effortlessly slaughter the upcoming scissors and win. That itself would get fairly repetitive, though I do admit it could be more interesting than the current system. Disallow the units that are too strong? No one is going to like that and it doesn't solve the problem of some units being so bad as to be unavailable really. Instead we just have some units that are too good to be available. Disallow different units each mission? Well they basically do that already especially in the later campaigns. I guess it works alright, but it's not as good as a more organic solution. To some extent I think this problem is intractable as long as your gameplay is rock-paper-scissors based. Not that you can't run into something similar without that. Warcraft 3 for example does have some units which definitely counter others, but there isn't a cyclical pattern of that at all. And in singleplayer the best option is to just mass heavy flyers every time. When I'm making an RTS-type game I usually resign myself to the idea that there will always be some unit or tactic which will win more easily than I'd like, but things are ok as long as 1) plenty of other units or mixes of units can also viably win and 2) trickier units in the hands of experts will win more impressively than the cookie-cutter approach would.
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Feb 4, 2017 04:50
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anilEhilated posted:I call it the Warcraft 3 problem - there's very little actual strategy You and me. Chainsaw swords. Atop my zeppelin. Sundown tonight. No one insults my beloved and lives!
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Feb 4, 2017 18:48
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anilEhilated posted:Hey, I like Warcraft 3. Its campaign is pretty fantastic and it was massively influential. It's just horrible as a strategy game. Just for that, this duel is going to be to the... I don't know, double-death or something. Warcraft 3 was one of the most strategically deep RTSes I ever played and that's why I stuck with it so many years and got so into the multiplayer. There was so much complexity to that game at not only the tactical but the strategic level. For example, in contrast to AoE and Starcraft and most other RTSes ever made, you actually needed to make a serious choice about whether to expand and when. And how big to grow your army and when. I'll admit that a lot of players tried to get by on cookie-cutter builds and micro (and whined as if it was unfair when I didn't), but a lot of people try to get by without thinking in every RTS. Good strategy would beat those people even if your micro was as lousy as mine. Regarding this game by the way, fortresses and using the terrain does actually play a role in the campaign (and in some multiplayer maps). There aren't as many terrain effects from things like high ground and whatnot as there probably should be though.
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Feb 4, 2017 22:19
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WarpedLichen posted:The AOE formula is heavy on raiding more because of how ridiculously tanky buildings are rather than anything else. High level play was about fortifying your resource points so I don't get your point about there not being "strong points." Its just that in the game you hold points so that your resources can't be raided. Also, if there isn't raiding going on, what IS going on? As far as I can see, the alternative is that everyone sits just for 30 minutes doing nothing but farm resources and auto-train troops until they have a maximum size army.
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Feb 5, 2017 05:28
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I'm going to need to postpone till next week. I'm all set up for the next episode and tried to record it several times, but I've got too many technical issues I need to resolve and a ton of other stuff I need to do this particular weekend. There are several groups of technical issues that I'd appreciate any advice (including alternative programs) on. 1) Dxtory now crashes or freezes every time I use it, whereas it didn't before. That's what forced me to switch to Shadowplay instead starting several episodes ago 2) Since Shadowplay is not capable of recording mic and game audio separately, I need to run Audacity in the background. In the last episode and now this one, that caused substantial lag whereas it hadn't before. 3) Shadowplay doesn't record the cursor, which isn't a catastrophe but is a nuisance. 4) The program I've been using for video editing (Shotcut) does the basics of what I need, but seems to have very few capabilities. I'd definitely like to switch to a new video editing program, preferably a free one. Does anyone know any good ones? For that matter, is there perhaps a program that would be less CPU-intensive than Audacity that I could use to record the mic? Any other suggestions? At this point, I'm feeling like I might actually have to switch to doing post-commentary, but I really want to avoid that if I can since it feels less authentic somehow.
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Feb 5, 2017 09:00
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While I'm dealing with these technical issues and other crises, here's a little screencap update. This is the army that ultimately broke down the gates of Troy in my horseless run. Most of the actual time spent was tearing down the 16 or so towers up on cliffs to get here, for which I used about 30 Manticores plus truckloads of archers (siege units are disabled on this mission to make a frontal assault impossible, but they misunderestimated me!). The Minotaurs are ok against Troy's cavalry, but mainly they're here because I have no other units available which deal crush damage to hurt buildings. The Manticores and Toxotes provide covering fire while they do that.  I need a LOT of production buildings since I'm taking a lot of casualties. I actually have several other piles of archery ranges and five or six temples for healing and myth unit production near the front lines too. Buildings are cheap, so it's good to make a TON of them and just keep rebuilding them closer to the lines as the battle moves.  Speaking of tons of buildings, here's my north flank. That's 4 fortresses and about 16 towers, all fully upgraded. The main limiting factor of my army on this level is population room, so I can't spare a big force to stay here and guard against scouts and attacks from the north during the main battle. Especially since Troy's Hetairoi are so souped up and Prodromoses are so useless that even a mass of Prodromoses can't win those fights easily. Instead, this lone Prodromos aggroes the entire wave of Hetairoi and lures them around to the south side of the forts. By the time they realize they're almost all dead, they have no chance of running back the other way alive. The temple nearby lets my Prodromos heal up so I can rinse and repeat. Just in case of some kind of SNAFU, I spawned my underworld passage there and near the Trojan gates so that I can bail my army back here if need be. Apollo is nearly essential for this strategy. Healing temples, Underworld Passage, Manticores, and powered up archers are all great here.  It took a couple of waves after I broke through the gates, but I destroyed their production buildings. This is just about all they have left.  So now I can run my army freely through the defenseless town, trampling the guards my 3 heroes were supposed to deal with alone. The Green 'Troy Civilians' cannot be attacked, so I can't explode this wonder.  I haven't started building the horse...  And yet here it is already inside the city! A mystery for the ages. If you then destroy the final fortresses, the standard ending cinematic of Troy getting wrecked with meteors plays. If you instead complete the horse, part 2 of the mission begins as normal with all your units being deleted. There are no guards if you killed them, but Arkantos will still advise you to sneak by their corpses. Since the gates are already down, you can't destroy the gates. Which means there is no way to summon Agamemnon's army or get your meteor powers (I painstakingly tore down a section of the 100x stronger wall just in case, and that doesn't summon them either). So you have to beat the surviving forts with just your helepoli. One thing I didn't try is what happens if you break into Troy through the northwest gate instead of the main one. I didn't try it because there are double the number of towers to chip down with archers, which would be a REALLY boring slog of autoattacking and autotraining replacements for hours while you fend off raids on the other side. Also, there wouldn't be a good chokepoint to set up masses of towers and forts at in the east. Still, I'll bet I could do it. Timeo Danaos et arcūs ferentes! Melth fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Feb 7, 2017 |
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Feb 7, 2017 20:06
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SIGSEGV posted:Do you still have to complete the horse to complete the win conditions or can it be skipped entirely? Entirely skippable, just wreck the fortresses. It's always the case in this game that just doing the final mission objective (even if undiscovered) will be a win. Which is why I keep mentioning that for my main line runs I'm always going to do every objective in order.
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Feb 8, 2017 03:03
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anilEhilated posted:Well, Odysseus did offend Poseidon but it had more to do blinding his son Polyphemus. Also the Homeric Greeks were TERRIBLE navigators. I mean in the stories Menelaus sets out from Turkey to Greece and winds up in Egypt. Other people end up west of Italy. Now I think they exaggerate their incompetence in those stories, but the Greeks were really lousy sailors by Mediterranean standards for about a thousand years. Cartoon Violence posted:I just wanted to post and say this LP is fantastic so far and I've really enjoyed it. Your playing is at a level higher than I've ever seen, and I'm having so much fun seeing a game that I spent a large part of my teenage years playing again with new eyes. Thanks! I'm always glad to hear people are enjoying these crazy things. Oh, and I have been trying to upload the next video for 4 hours now and it's at 30%. So... might take till tomorrow to actually be online, but it IS finished and ready.
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Feb 14, 2017 04:05
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I can neither confirm nor deny that I spent three hours making my beautiful new 'Melth' emblem. Oh and as a sidenote, the next video is done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROHAjZwh4WI
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Feb 14, 2017 12:39
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Smiling Knight posted:Tbh, in some versions (really dumb versions) Helen actually spent the entire Trojan War in Egypt Herodotus believed some dumb stuff, yeah. The best part is how arrogantly he'd say that the crazy stuff he believed had to be true and that anyone with any sense could see it. Like his bizarre explanation of the Nile's annual flood where he rejects a couple of stupid ideas about it, then rejects the truth too. And then says that clearly the annual inundation happens because winter storms blow the sun off course to the south to go over Egypt and the sun attracts water to follow it and thus the Nile floods.
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Feb 14, 2017 20:45
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Astroclassicist posted:That's a rather unfair view of Greek navigational skills - though ancient ships could sail against the wind to an extent, everyone prepared to sail with the wind behind them. Nevermind that their penteconters were primarily oar-powered rather than sail-powered, even with sailing ships it would be a remarkable feat of bad seamanship to go 600 miles southeast when your goal was to go directly west. Doubly so when you're crossing a sea like the Aegean where you can stop at an island every couple of hours for directions or shelter from unfavorable winds if you want to. Triply so when a foolproof land-hugging route was available (Which of course is what the Persians did with their huge fleets). Quadruply so when you're setting out with between dozens and hundreds of other ships going in the same general direction. But that's a mythical story anyway, so it hardly tells us anything about their real skill or lack thereof. For that I'm going to rely on Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, Xenophon, and indeed every other ancient Greek source I ever read who ever talked about sailing and seamanship. They all agree that most Greeks were bad sailors prior to the Persian wars and that knowledge of this lack of skill shaped their tactics in those wars. Thucydides goes into a lot of detail about which states in Greece had a substantial navy or seafaring tradition at the start of the Peloponnesian War. Only 3 have a serious navy, and the Athenians completely outclass the other two in skill. The Spartan side continuously discuss their own lack of sailing skill and need to acquire some. The Athenians consistently thrashed them in open sea engagements and are defeated only when they get penned into small areas- just like the Greeks did to the better Persian sailors during the Persian wars. Plutarch's sources about the era agree. Xenophon talks about sailing only briefly, but so does he. So from these sources we can see that according to the Greeks themselves- as well as to the outcomes of their battles- most Greeks states did not start to be naval powers or have much sailing skill until the era of the Persian and then Peloponessian wars. Which, as I said, was a roughly 1000 year period from the supposed time of the Odyssey. Darkest Auer posted:Part of that is that basically everyone has hated/feared/despised sailors since the dawn of time. The sea's a dangerous place and how can you trust someone who voluntarily goes to foreign and strange places? If you're at all interested in how naval trade developed and influenced the world I highly recommend The Sea and Civilization. I don't know about everyone. There were some cultures where sailors were respected. But it's definitely true that many cultures despised merchants and sailors. Attitudes about all kinds of crafts and professions varied with time and place a lot though. Like we usually think of blacksmiths as having been respected and prominent members of the community- and surely in any sensible society they would be- but in some places they were considered dirty and in others they were thought to be bad people who probably practiced witchcraft. anilEhilated posted:I like the way this mission actually lets you train some reinforcements, giving you some more illusion of strategy. Too often the walky missions in RTS games turn into puzzles where the only way to win is finding the intended path through enemy forces. I have mixed feelings about it. WC3 was amazing at doing these kinds of missions well and had a mix of ones that were truly fixed party and ones where you got some resources to buy more troops on the way. Both can be very well done, but I generally preferred the fixed party ones in those games. Particularly because they typically made you do sidequests to get more troops, which is more interesting than buying them. My favorite videogame that I ever made is a limited resources to buy troops WC3 map though. I think this game struggles with its fixed party missions. A lot of them are borderline unlosable and thus basically cinematics. But the ones where you CAN buy troops like this one often feel too linear to me with no side content to explore or interesting stuff to do. Plus you still have the same old problem that it's all about momentum and if you do badly in an early battle you're going to be crushed in the next one.
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Feb 17, 2017 00:38
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