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Carpator Diei posted:Congratulations, it was an amazing LP  This was really good. Also can't wait to hear your thoughts on the Chinese units.
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Jan 10, 2022 01:02
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anilEhilated posted:
Apparently they've been nerfed a LOT since I first played them. I remember thinking that they were stupidly overpowered, with by far the best mounted units of every possible kind in a game where mobility is king. So I have no idea how they hold up now after all the re-balancing. Slaan posted:Five years later and Age of Mythology is finally wrecked completely What a journey it's been!
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Jan 10, 2022 21:08
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Myth Busted
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Jan 11, 2022 00:34
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Congratulations on finishing the game and LP! Your solution to X12 is a lot more involved than mine:  Trees protecting trees.
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Jan 11, 2022 11:44
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Great job! Looking forward to Age of Wonders III, that's a great game that I also played in MP a fair bit. Have you played indie free game Battle for Wesnoth? It's got a really deep hex-based combat system that seems right up your alley. More RNG than Fire Emblem or Advance Wars, but the combat preview gives you bar charts of expected damage outcomes so at least you're don't need to do the math yourself.
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Jan 11, 2022 14:57
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Asehujiko posted:Your solution to X12 is a lot more involved than mine: Legend has it that Amanra is still trapped there to this day! Smiling Knight posted:Great job! Looking forward to Age of Wonders III, that's a great game that I also played in MP a fair bit. I've heard of Battle for Wesnoth, and several times I've almost got started playing it. But so far I haven't quite got around to it. I'm looking forward to Age of Wonders III as well. Mara and my best friend both like it a lot too and sometimes we play it multiplayer, so I'm considering whether to try co-commentating on it like that.
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Jan 11, 2022 15:01
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I've got a question about the best way to archive this LP, since it's the first video one I finished, and it has been many years since the last screenshot one I finished. Do I talk to the same person?
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Jan 13, 2022 07:54
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The sandcastle thread has what you need, namely, this, but it should broadly be the same process, it's certainly still the same person.
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Jan 13, 2022 08:00
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I'm working on the first mission of the Chinese campaign now- which is the mission that got me interested in doing an LP of this game to begin with. It looks like they've fixed a few of the many, many, MANY bugs in the last 6 years but nowhere near all of them!
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Dec 9, 2022 03:39
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I've played Wesnoth, it is interesting at the least, I had fun with some of the campaigns I will say
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Dec 9, 2022 05:22
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Sounds interesting, I'm looking forward to seeing that. Especially as I never picked up that expansion (because of the bugs).
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Dec 9, 2022 11:56
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I'd love to hear your thoughts on the Chinese unit roster; frankly can't really make heads or tails of that faction.
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Dec 9, 2022 12:19
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anilEhilated posted:I'd love to hear your thoughts on the Chinese unit roster; frankly can't really make heads or tails of that faction. When the game came out at least, almost every single one of them was stupidly overpowered. Like to such an extent that it was clear they hadn't even tried to balance them. It looks like in patch after patch after patch they nerfed tons of Chinese units down into sanity. In the campaign they stay crazy, but it's 100% Chinese vs Chinese so that doesn't matter much.
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Dec 10, 2022 01:47
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Melth posted:In the campaign they stay crazy, but it's 100% Chinese vs Chinese so that doesn't matter much. This right here is one of the (many) weaknesses of the campaign, IMO. While I get why it is that way, the lack of enemy variety is really, really boring. All in all, it feels like, outside of perhaps the visuals (it's been a long time since I actually looked at any of it, so I don't remember how good they may or may not have been), the entire Chinese Expansion was insultingly low effort and low-quality. And I find myself genuinely hoping that the in-production remake completely ignores its existence - or, if it does include the Chinese, they do it *well* this time.
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Dec 10, 2022 19:27
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BlazetheInferno posted:This right here is one of the (many) weaknesses of the campaign, IMO. While I get why it is that way, the lack of enemy variety is really, really boring. I agree. It was an outright disgrace. I would be ashamed to have my name in the credits of that campaign. The only good mission is the first one.
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Dec 11, 2022 03:30
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Tale of the Dragon 1: Rising Waters Almost 6 years since I beat this mission and first realized that there weren't any good videos about it, I've finally made my own!
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Dec 11, 2022 20:00
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Wow the lack of quality was not a joke. 
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Dec 11, 2022 21:20
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Poil posted:Wow the lack of quality was not a joke. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Dec 11, 2022 |
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Dec 11, 2022 21:32
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Poil posted:Wow the lack of quality was not a joke. And this is the good part. It's all downhill from here. In fact, forget being downhill. The quality is off a cliff from here, plummeting into an abyss of slapdash work and laziness.
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Dec 11, 2022 22:26
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anilEhilated posted:It gets worse every single time you see a new mythic unit. I am eagerly looking forward to how this campaign will manage to screw up with a foundation as solid as AoM.
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Dec 11, 2022 22:58
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Apparently, the rest of the Chinese campaign is so bad that Melth only wanted to do this one mission since it had a fair bit of good hidden in the terrible mess.
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Dec 11, 2022 23:43
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Obviously that means it's time for Rage of Poseidon, right?
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Dec 12, 2022 00:01
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FoolyCharged posted:Apparently, the rest of the Chinese campaign is so bad that Melth only wanted to do this one mission since it had a fair bit of good hidden in the terrible mess. Though seeing that they've apparently fixed a lot of bugs during the years since I said "I will do the first mission and ONLY the first mission" I am now a little bit curious whether they made the rest playable too.
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Dec 12, 2022 00:59
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I remember trying out this scenario on normal shortly after launch and getting immediately destroyed by an endless horde of salamanders. After some googling it turned out to be possible to break the difficulty triggers in such a way that on normal(and only on normal), the wave timers for the other difficulties would also be active, and each one would fire ALL spawns, instead of just the one for the relevant difficulty for a sixteen-fold increase in the number of salamanders.
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Dec 13, 2022 22:24
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quote:What, you don't think that Literally Just A Lizard is a top-tier design for a mythic monstrosity? What's wrong with the Behemoth?
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Dec 13, 2022 22:39
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Bloodly posted:What's wrong with the Behemoth? Now now, the Behemoth may be boring in gameplay, but it's just not reasonable to say it looks like a generic lizard. I mean the head is sort of like a triceratops with that big backward-facing crest thing (whatever those are called), but then it has tusks rather than horns. And its feet look sort of like hooves rather than claws. And the body has a bunch of segments that remind me of an armadillo or maybe an ankylosaurus or something. I would have to call it at least a moderately creative monster design. Also contrast the war lizard with several other myth unit reptiles. The petsuchos is just a big crocodile, but then they made it interesting by letting it shoot lasers and having a giant mirror and so forth. The wadjet is slightly boring, but the huge flapping face-wings made it look like not just another snake. If you ask me, the wadjet was about as boring as designs got in the original age of mythology, but even that is better than the War Salamander. That said, I don't actually have a problem with the war salamander's appearance. If Chinese myth had 'a lizard but huge' as one of their mythical beasts, I'd say it's fine and good. But there's no myth backing it up at all! I'd still probably be ok with it, just like I was ok with the anubite or other monsters the designers just made up, if it did something interesting. But it's just a big slow lizard that walks up and bites you and has no interesting special ability. It still doesn't honestly bother me that much. One boring unit isn't too bad. I'm much more bored by how generic most soldiers are in this game compared to something like Starcraft or Warcraft where almost everything has an ability and serves some kind of role other than being a generic melee infantry or a generic archer. Even cavalry is little more than 'infantry but fast!'
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Dec 14, 2022 17:48
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Honestly, I'm wondering if the giant salamander is from Japanese folklore by accident. I know Japan has its giant salamanders, and while I know gently caress all about Japanese mythology I wouldn't be surprised if the salamanders feature in at least one or two myths.
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Dec 14, 2022 18:52
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Sadly, the Chinese word plastered on the DLC logo reads like a placeholder-turned-prophecy: 玩笑 wanxiao "joke".quote:No direct link to the Atlantis story Forgotten Empires posted:The Chinese campaign continues the story of the Age of Mythology. The Titans have shattered yin and yang and the balance of power is threatened. With hopes dwindling and brave men few and far between, a mysterious Chinese heroine rises from the shadows and summons an ancient creature to her aid, a creature not seen for centuries, a creature only loyal to her – a mighty dragon. With its help she embarks on a mission to fight for the restoration of the balance. Some other choice quotes from the pitch: Forgotten Empires posted:Unique Selling Points: RPS posted:Several months after The Forgotten's release, they petitioned Microsoft for approval to do an expansion for the then-new Age of Mythology Extended Edition. The answer was initially no, but Forgotten Empires kept asking. "Finally they said, 'What do you think about making another expansion for Age of Empires,'" "Then we kind of came back with, 'Why don't we do both?' And then apparently one guy at Microsoft agreed with that." cuc fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Dec 15, 2022 |
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Dec 15, 2022 17:39
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Sorry for double post, previous one is getting a bit long with quotes.Cythereal posted:Honestly, I'm wondering if the giant salamander is from Japanese folklore by accident. I know Japan has its giant salamanders, and while I know gently caress all about Japanese mythology I wouldn't be surprised if the salamanders feature in at least one or two myths. The very recent discovery of one such species Giant salamanders in Japanese culture: they weren't very important - there's no rich vein of iconography or anything. But according to what I found, they were considered immortal animals due to their ability to heal. They were hunted for meat that helps longevity, and charms worn by the wounded to improve healing. No idea what era these were from, because like everywhere else, beliefs in Japan changed a lot over history. Melth posted:Some are novel characters. For many other cultures, the answer is relatively straightforward: their societies have a more or less shared belief system in the supernatural, and they have stories about the supernatural characters, some held as true and significant (myths), some as fun tales (legends), the line between two often blurry or nonexistent. But the elite "high culture" of China developed very early into a pragmatic, highly rationalist worldview that no longer sought justification and legitimacy from personified gods. This attitude is exemplified by Confucius quotes like "If we don't know life, how can we know death?" and "The Master never talked of: [the preternatural]; violence; disorders; [gods and spirits]", but far from confined to this single thinker whose philosophy was made the official ideology of China in Han dynasty. Due to this, plus the intensely violent competitions that birthed the unified China, no sources have been left from the official belief systems of Bronze Age China that's as neatly systematic and readily digestible as the Twelve Olympians or the Pantheon of Thebes. The beliefs of the Shang can only be gleamed from their oracle bones and inscriptions; the myths of Zhou have to be pieced together painstakingly from sources in all their fragmentary glory. And you know what happened in Han? Euhemerism (reading myths as disguised history) and baldfaced invention, which further added layers of complication. And what you commonly read as Chinese myth is largely the work of a Yuan Ke, who did the piecing in 20th century - because "what is Chinese myth" is a problem that would never occur to the traditional Chinese intelligentsia, without getting in contact with the West and realizing "other ancient civilizations like Greece and India have beautiful mythologies, we must have had one too". But if the official ideology had left the supernatural world a big gaping hole, what did people fill the hole with? - First of all, the most central, bona fide religion-level Chinese belief is ancestor worship, which includes honoring ancestors with your own achievements, and maintaining the bloodline, so that when you join the ancestors' ranks, you can together receive worship from future generations. - Organized religions - foreign ones, local ones, gave people intricate scriptures to balm the soul (or scar the soul, in the case of hell, a concept imported from India). - But similar to Japan, folk-level Chinese culture is pragmatic and extremely unpicky about what to worship. Everything can be gods, especially dead humans. It is the most unstrange sight to see a bodhisattva, a historical hero, a local folk god, and a fictional character enshrined in the same hall, and people have worshipped far worse things. And obviously, over the 2000 years, people never stopped telling tales of the supernatural. Today we may know Sun Wukong as from the novel Journey to the West, but the novel was itself built on folklore and theater that came before. If you look to times before the novel, he was a theater character, perhaps with some local monkey gods mixed in; if you look to times after the novel became hugely influential, of course he would be worshipped like every beloved hero. (If there's one 100% novel character in the TotD choices, that's actually Ao Kuang, the Dragon King of East Sea. That waterbodies are governed by dragon kings is a concept imported from the Indian naga, another of the thousands of ways Buddhism influenced China. But Ao Kuang in particular seems wholly invented by Journey to the West.) As you can see, we are getting into the second part of the question: if after the Bronze Age, myths and supernatural tales continued to be invented and believed in, at least by "low society", how late do we draw the line for inclusion? Case in point: the modern image of the hopping jiangshi wears Qing-dynasty official uniforms, because the Hong Kong film industry was money-pinching, that's how recent that look was. For a commercial product, I can sympathize with creators who use materials iconic to global society, regardless of period accuracy. It'd be hard to imagine a Japanese civ without famous creatures like the kappa or oni, just because they were never mentioned in the "canonical" texts of Japanese myth. TL;DR What is myth what is fiction what is history, majority of Chinese people didn't care cuc fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Dec 15, 2022 |
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Dec 15, 2022 20:20
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Tutorials Redone: Hunt for a Killer, Pleasing the Gods, Uninvited Guests I've been wanting to redo these earliest videos for a while!
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Dec 17, 2022 20:04
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Tale of the Dragon 2: To the West The award for most-improved mission just might go to this one!
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Dec 19, 2022 04:24
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Not a bad foundation to a level, but it is missing all the filler, as it were. The triggers, mini scutscenes, relics and wild monsters, the finishing touches in general.
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Dec 19, 2022 14:24
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Chronische posted:Not a bad foundation to a level, but it is missing all the filler, as it were. The triggers, mini scutscenes, relics and wild monsters, the finishing touches in general. Agreed. Still, perhaps because of how awful it used to be, I found it fairly fun overall. I think I'd generally take a mission with solid fundamentals but no frills over a mission that has finishing touches but boring design (like several from the original campaigns)
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Dec 20, 2022 05:37
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Melth posted:Tale of the Dragon 2: To the West  Did anyone playtest this?cuc posted:This opens up a highly nuanced question: What is Chinese myth? 
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Dec 20, 2022 22:31
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Carpator Diei posted:Did I hear that right, the mission explicitly tells you to use a specific siege unit against the enemy base, but you can't recruit that unit in this mission? I agree it was an interesting read! It doesn't quite match what I learned when I studied Chinese history or philosophy in college, but I only took 1 course of those apiece so I don't really know what I'm talking about. I'm quite confident though when I say that no one had playtested several of these levels at the time of release. Some missions outright skipped. Like the previous mission would send you to the wrong mission, skipping over one in the middle. Or a mission would just default to the victory screen sometimes.
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Dec 21, 2022 01:14
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Has anyone else had problems with Age of Mythology crashing the computer when you quit? I get it pretty routinely. The only workaround I've found that works sometimes is to open up an instance of task manager BEFORE starting the game and then alt-tab to that, because trying to open task manager during the game just causes a crash too.
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Mar 26, 2023 03:32
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Tale of the Dragon 3: From Below Much like the first expansion, the difficulty levels of this one are wildly uneven. The first level is brutal, the second one used to be, this one is super easy!
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Mar 26, 2023 19:19
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The levels only get worse from here, brace yourselves! At least, due to how awfully they are designed, you can sometimes get through them fairly quickly. Sometimes.
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Mar 26, 2023 22:50
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Chronische posted:The levels only get worse from here, brace yourselves! At least, due to how awfully they are designed, you can sometimes get through them fairly quickly. Sometimes. Sometimes when you beat them, you can advance to the next level. But only sometimes. Other times it just bugs and you get stuck and have to restart and redo it.
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Mar 28, 2023 07:52
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It's just so hard to see why this expansion got its rep
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Mar 30, 2023 04:05
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