|
Strategic Sage posted:That was a really good effort-post. Thanks! I was aware of the idea in general, but definitely didn't know all those specifics. Honestly considering your pristine challenge I don't think it would simplify things that much, and it has drawbacks . The getting warehouse will have its cart BUSY zooming from one side of the map to the other and then doing deliveries; the solution is more warehouses but then correct Feng Shui locations start to dry up; it also hits the labour pool hard. If you start that way the road networks need to stay unconnected or everything jams down, limiting possible expansion. I was just wondering if you knew of the technique. Maybe give it a try one map to show it off? Your choice, I'm deeply enjoying your LPs anyways. I would recommend it for monument building though. Just have the guilds and monument on their own small network(s), no need for a dedicated warehouse. It's not like it skips the actually hard part (mass producing/importing the construction materials)
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2022 16:18
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 6, 2024 19:07 |
|
|
 Edge of the Ordos (51:49) I'm surprised nobody called me out for not knowing how Salt actually works, but I learned doing this scenario that it's actually a better mechanic than I realized. We also have an early fight which definitely is the toughest military challenge we've hit so far in the game ... and I think it's pretty weird that it's fairly random whether you have to deal with it or not. Gobi Bears, and a bit on the Western Zhou stability and structure - or lack thereof - as well. And of course Irrigation, a significant new mechanic that is vital out here on frontier. Next up we'll transition to the Eastern Zhou or at least begin that process, including another king who made an ill-advised choice of which concubine/wife to favor and paid for it.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2022 14:37
|
|
|
Spring and Autumn Weather (1:47:59) The Western Zhou has fallen. Turns out you just can't be an incompetent ruler in an unstable situation without that eventually catching up to you. This one ... has a lot going on. A bigger city than before, and due to challenge conditions we can't fish and can't have water-route trading partners. We also had to build housing quite a bit less securely than the scenario intends. And then there's a nice big monument to build as well. Took a lot of doing, but we eventually got there. Also for any who care, this is the first video on a new channel - I'm sticking with the one account here, on discord, etc. for simplicity's sake but going forward all my history-focused content is going to be located at Historic Sage.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2022 15:25
|
|
|
In cases like this, I wonder how much of the blame lies on "making the new queen smile", and how much was heaped on her existence after the action, after all the king has so much power as to distort every single human behavior around him. Unrelated, but i love the expression "spring and autumn".
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2022 23:04
|
|
|
New Ways (1:04:15) Forward a couple centuries, and it's time to talk about ancient Chinese religions/philosophies/traditions. Frankly none of those terms fit, with all the baggage they carry with them, but we have to call them *something*. Ways of thinking/schools of thought? Whatever they are, Confucianism and Taoism/Daoism deserve a bit of focus. That repetitive background voice that we've been hearing proclaiming "Confucius say ... " now has a bit to go with it, though of course we are only scratching the most surface layers here. We get a couple of new religious structures, needed for pushing our elite housing to the next level. There's now only one tier of common and elite housing that remain beyond our reach. And Confucius himself visits the city and plays an important role. Next we'll move out of the Spring and Autumn period into the final phase of the Zhou Dynasty, and start building something truly monumental. You might even call it 'great'.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2022 20:52
|
|
|
Were there food import options in the mission? Salt is probably available if all other food types are duplicates. But the 4 and especially 5 food types menu is always a pain, especially since the worker housing stalls keep stealing the rare foods from the mill. It is usually a good idea to have the mill closer to the elite shopkeepers to mitigate the issue.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2022 07:55
|
|
|
Yeah you might not have seen it but I put a comment on the video - I think having a second mill by the elite area and having only that one accept fish would have been good. Among the trade partners I had I think there was just cabbage. I could have imported salt from someone else I guess ... not sure how much that would have really helped in the long run. But of course mostly I just needed to remember to turn the hunters back on sooner.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2022 20:35
|
|
|
I was also going to say about you opening that gate to market employees, but you figured it out. Could definitely have made it smoother with a second mill and some food imports.
|
|
#
?
May 28, 2022 01:40
|
|
|
Hopefully we did better with food in this one. Iron and Earth (1:39:00) This is the longest scenario so far by game time, running nearly a decade and a half - and I think I did pretty well in actually getting it done reasonably quickly given the scale of the tasks presented. There's some definite cheesing of the combat in order to survive early on - the elite iron chariots we face are no joke and will tear through anything we can send against them. And then there's the work. Work, work, and more work, putting together one of the earlier sections of the 'Great Wall' - even if it is sort of in the wrong place. Historical focus is on the transition to the Warring States period, final phase of the Zhou dynasty, and also the much-debated Sun Tzu and the Art of War. One Zhou scenario remains before China's longest-running dynasty is finally consigned to memory. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Jun 6, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jun 4, 2022 16:34
|
|
|
That spy swiping a full 400 iron stack from a weaponsmith without Sage noticing anything at around 28:00 was fun. That spy is also why the warehouse caught fire later, it was arson.
Omobono fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Jun 4, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jun 4, 2022 18:08
|
|
|
I strongly suspected it was arson but missed the theft. Fun times with unguarded wealth. Building the wall is, not surprisingly, very time consuming. There is one worse project that takes possibly even longer and is also a lot duller. Poil fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Jun 4, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jun 4, 2022 18:58
|
|
|
I'm going to say that while The Art Of War has a legendary reputation, the immense majority of it is a giant checklist of the various ways a military commander or state leader might be filling their diapers, and then offering advice on potty training. War being quite difficult, and unpleasant too, this advice is often welcome, it's also basic and generic, and that's because there's a lot of ways to gently caress up the basic and generic parts, and the high end bleeding edge stuff is rarely done because it requires you to know exactly what you are doing and is also tremendously risky, which is why it's rarely done. Considering, for example, the last campaign Colin Powel was involved in, he might have sought advice in the same tradition and invoked stratagem 36 quite some time earlier.
|
|
#
?
Jun 5, 2022 01:58
|
|
|
Omobono posted:That spy swiping a full 400 iron stack from a weaponsmith without Sage noticing anything at around 28:00 was fun. That spy is also why the warehouse caught fire later, it was arson. I definitely ignore spies almost exclusively. I don't find them that useful, and so far at least I haven't had enough problems with them to justify putting a lot of effort into stopping them. I guess if they keep setting my buildings on fire I might change that approach. Poil posted:Building the wall is, not surprisingly, very time consuming. There is one worse project that takes possibly even longer and is also a lot duller. Oh how very exciting ....
|
|
#
?
Jun 5, 2022 05:46
|
|
|
If inspector coverage is good spy arson is pointless, since there's a grace period between a building catching fire and burning down. I agree that spies are an annoyance at worst, just plop a guard station or send Sun Tzu in areas with suspected spies (it's the military area 75% of the times).
|
|
#
?
Jun 5, 2022 10:15
|
|
|
Spies can steal from warehouses, houses, industries and forts. Sending spies to sabotage military is quite overpowered. I looked up when the worst project mission is. The good news is that it'll be over soon, the bad news is that it's the next mission.
|
|
#
?
Jun 5, 2022 10:37
|
|
|
Waaaaaaaahhhhhh .... I had just started looking at that map, hadn't gotten any further than 'I think I'll build my housing block here' and 'wow, that's an awfully big monument I need to make room for. I'm sure it won't be that bad to build ... ' Ah well.
|
|
#
?
Jun 5, 2022 15:38
|
|
|
I mean, nothing beats that late Pharaoh mission where you have to build 2 medium pyramids and a big one while also having a sizable noble housing count. In Pharaoh's Cruel and Unusual Geography maps (copyright by user Afterburner in the rpg.net forums). Like, one of the pyramids must go on the medium sized island in the Nile, there's no space anywhere else. E: I'm glad they changed the way elite housing works in Zeus and Emperor, because in Caesar 3 and Pharaoh elite housing is an upgrade over worker housing, triggered by luxury goods (at least in Pharaoh) so when you don't know how nobles work (they don't) you lose all your workforce for unexplained reasons and when you do you have a period of stupid% unemployment until your noble housing area finally upgrades to lazy nobles. Omobono fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Jun 5, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jun 5, 2022 18:25
|
|
|
Omobono posted:I mean, nothing beats that late Pharaoh mission where you have to build 2 medium pyramids and a big one while also having a sizable noble housing count. Yeah, this is a huge improvement, and a reason why I could never go back to Pharaoh after playing Zeus and Emperor. Workforce magically teleporting from the houses to their workplace on the other side of the map might be unrealistic, but it's a huge QOL increase for me as a player. I admit, I think Zeus has it best in terms of monuments. Because even the most labor intensive project doesn't take as long as the Emperor monuments, not to mention the Pharaoh ones. And also because they provide tangible benefits, often pretty strong benefits. Instead of just being checkmarks on your mission profile.
|
|
#
?
Jun 5, 2022 19:35
|
|
|
Torrannor posted:Yeah, this is a huge improvement, and a reason why I could never go back to Pharaoh after playing Zeus and Emperor. Workforce magically teleporting from the houses to their workplace on the other side of the map might be unrealistic, but it's a huge QOL increase for me as a player. Strategic Sage posted:Waaaaaaaahhhhhh ....
|
|
#
?
Jun 5, 2022 20:21
|
|
|
This entire family of city builders do justify the way simcity did it, instead of physical agents walking around, just run some standard urbanism calculations to see how things work, and toss in some decorative agents walking around for ambience. No more buildings burning down because the prefect decided to walk the other way that morning. It's also a lot easier on the machine running it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 5, 2022 20:36
|
|
|
Turns out I was wrong about the worst project. I got the campaigns mixed up. It's further ahead.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2022 15:00
|
|
|
We'll get there eventually. King Cuo's Temple (1:04:49) In which I wax sarcastic about the stupid amount of dirt required for the Grand Temple Complex. We meet two new heroes, Mencius and Xi Wang Mu, and make lacquerware for the first time. A very strange end to the Zhou dynasty as it's easier than the last few with a lot of options for most of the city layout and no military threats. Particularly considering the absolute chaos that was actually happening with wars at this time. So that part felt bizarre. Once we get built up, it's pretty much just all about the monument which is quite the undertaking even if there are more strenuous ones coming. We'll be taking a pretty lengthy break from Emperor now, and moving to Hegemony Gold which has lots of good history in it about what was happening in the Greek part of the world while the latter stages of the Zhou Dynasty were unfolding in China. The Qin Dynasty will be waiting here for us when we return.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2022 16:54
|
|
|
Nice work.  Yeah the difficulty is all over the place. Some of the earlier stuff is a lot harder as you have such limited cash at the start.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2022 17:07
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 6, 2024 19:07 |
|
|
Strategic Sage posted:We'll get there eventually. It's weird that, after the combat of the last mission or two, this one wasn't a military oriented mission. Like, they could have given it a case of "You'll need to conquer neighbouring cities for Stone"
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2022 01:12
|
|