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disposablewords posted:Make the game sob in terror.
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Jul 5, 2022 06:59
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Pull out all the stops, and make the game weep in terror.
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Jul 5, 2022 11:57
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Give it no quarters.
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Jul 5, 2022 13:00
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Chaos Dunk!
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Jul 5, 2022 23:16
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Destroy this game and make it weep
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Jul 6, 2022 00:07
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As I recall, you get an item called the Gorgon's Standard or suchlike for walloping him the first time around, and it's the item that gives you the points. Also you'd think the Gorgon would roll around with an army and only get caught out alone via Shenanigans, but there you go. Kind of surprised that one Artifact that Blesses all of your provinces and gives you more money than you could ever really use never popped up, used to seeing that one early. DUNK. It's what this game deserves.
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Jul 6, 2022 00:38
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Unoriginal One posted:Also you'd think the Gorgon would roll around with an army and only get caught out alone via Shenanigans, but there you go. He seems to spawn with an army but then, since he gets into an early war, I assume it gets worn down and he never re-recruits a new bodyguard.
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Jul 6, 2022 00:40
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I think this game has shown that it deserves no mercy. Break the game and laugh Also, you mentioned having a Rod of Resurrection, but would that let you res Hubaere after he died on the battlefield or is that just a "during an adventure" thing?
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Jul 6, 2022 02:46
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Shei-kun posted:I think this game has shown that it deserves no mercy. Only during adventures, of course. Don't be silly. On the other hand, blasty wands can absolutely be used on the battlefield. Because consistent application of a ruleset is for suckers and cowards. 
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Jul 6, 2022 08:27
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Update 11: Breaking the Rules, Breaking the World Okay, no more playing nice. Let's dunk on The Gorgon and his Alliance.  Step one: Finding the right nation. The two most important aspects of a strong starting nation are a high-level mage ruler and economic power. I could've also picked Caine from Endier, and in fact I think he starts with better actual spells and magic, but Sielwode has a lot of high-level Source holdings, elven troops and borders several Awnsleighen-ruled nations. Also it pleases me to beat the game with a nation it calls "Hard." Sucker.     Step two: Listen to these cone-headed morons blabber on about war and alliances. We start off allied with the fascists and the almost-fascists in the other woods across the continent, they just represent free victory points. There's also, as usual, an adventure popping up. We'll still be doing some adventures, but we'll be doing them the right way.   Sielwode starts off with a small army for their size, but thankfully elf troops are only hard countered by skeletons, dwarves and large amounts of battle magic. Anyway, the first ~10 turns of the game are pretty peaceful, so we're going to spend them solidifying our economic power, no need to care about an army for a while.     My first focus is securing some of the continent's trading guilds so I can have the money to buy more things. You'll notice that I'm bribing them with an expensive and rare level 6 holding and you might think, "but Purple! Those are non-fungible territories! You can only sell them once! Is a small trading concern really worth that?" And to that I reply:    Holdings are the ideal thing to trade to independents you want to recruit, because once you recruit them, you get all their holdings, including ones you just traded away to them. Second in line after recruiting a couple of guilds are temples, since they get me both Priests, which are actually useful, and also money, and Source holdings, since they get me mages, which are very useful, and Regency Points.  With money running a bit low, I decide to do a few adventures in between the buying and selling. Adventures are still beneficial for three reasons: Firstly, NPC(and hell, even PC) mages start with dogshit spell loadouts in many ways. They need spell tomes to buff them up, especially in terms of realm spells. Secondly, there might be gold to find. Thirdly, adventure artifacts are sometimes useful on the strategic map and always provide extra victory points.   In addition to Hubaere's True Seeing, Locate Object and Teleport will be the most important spells for this adventure.    Of course, before we can bust out the Good Combo, we get rushed by a bunch of ogres and goblins. However, one of the tricks to being an adventuring mage in turn-based mode is that spellcasting doesn't consume a turn, so as long as you have enough spells memorized to blast away something's HP, they can never touch you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBZXb1ab-1Y Also this place has weird-rear end music like all the rest do. Anyway.  The only failure of this strategy is that the Quest Object marker is deeply unreliable on some of the larger maps for inscrutable reasons, but here we just cast Teleport, click on the obvious location and...     Boom. Adventure solved in record time. With True Seeing also showing treasures on the map, once you have the quest objective, it's also worth teleporting around to various concentrated treasure locations and hoovering them up.     Aelies in particular is a completely insane score, since he's something like a 16th-level mage right off the bat.        More "adventuring" ensues.      Note in the upper left how the Regency stash is growing wildly. I also think I've "sold" Fhyllallien's Law holding to like eight different independents at this point. It's hilarious. I can start paying a lot of my bills in Regency at this point, freeing up even more gold for diplomacy, though that soon won't even be necessary since gold income is also skyrocketing.    It's also at this point that Anuire starts heating up militarily. Threats aside, though, the Gorgon and his buddies don't actually attack this time, they just walk around threateningly and force me to recruit a bit more elven cavalry.     Second Swamp Mage? Who the hell is the first Swamp Mage? Some of these mages are also charity cases, like Hermedhie, an 8th-level mage whose only combat spells are Magic Missile and "Moraeulfs Poison Arrow," which seems to be an odd and pointless mangling of Melf's Acid Arrow.        This adventure's teleport location plops me down right in front of what the game identifies as a "Wizard." As NPC's don't seem able to cast spells, however, this mostly just means he's a fragile old man with a knife.     In most of 2e, Charisma is extremely a dump stat. It's the one tied to the least systems, and the one most often ignored by GM's. In The Gorgon's Alliance it has absolutely zero impact on anything whatsoever, it's just victory points and that's it.   Back on the strategic layer, the Gorgon declares war again and this time actually sends like three goblins to prove how serious he is.   Doesn't work out well for them.   Mur-Kilad brings more goons, and are actually threatening, but since they don't bring any wizards, they get blasted off the battlefield by fireballs.      Points East Trading is the last independent we manage to scarf up before the list is completely hoovered clean. I'm not sure if the AI is programmed specifically to go for the independents or just generally to attempt to vassalize everything that moves for points and power, but usually around turn 9 or 10 the list is completely cleaned up.   This means it's time for more adventure while I decide what to take advantage of.   It's the usual matter of spawning in, True Seeingm, Locate Object and then Teleport. However, on these larger maps it becomes harder to tell exactly where the dot is. As far as I can tell there's a red dot right under the left part of the text, but when I teleport there...   I get a dining room.    It's actually right below the text instead.   With that sorted, it's time to diplomatize a bit. Baruk-Azhik is our neighbour and reasonably beefy, so I set to work getting them to eventual vassalized status.    Mur-Kilad declares war again, and this time I return the favour by marching in and settling two-thirds of my lieutenants and some freshly recruited elf cavalry on their two home provinces. Elf cavalry is a bit odd since usually mounted troops have the advantage of being able to move two squares at a time, but all elves can do this, even elf infantry, bowmen or regents/lieutenants, so it leaves them as just being tougher elf infantry that can also fire arrows.       They do the job just fine, though. The main issue here is wearing down the dwarven fortresses and eventually investing the provinces.   I pass the time with more adventuring, because regents can lead armies even while off exploring dungeons.   This dungeon is funny because it has an "open" outdoors areas, where things have rooftops, so due to the "can't do room-over-room" part of the chosen engine, even the smallest shack needs to be its own little sub-zone so you can also stand on the roof. It's also one of those "sliced tower" dungeons, and it has the exact same issue that Rhuobhe's tower had, which is that if you walk to the top of it, the teleport trigger to let you get back down again is broken or misplaced, so you can dead man walking yourself. Also once again, bad quest objective marker, the red dot is clearly in the lower right of the marked slice, but the objective is actually in the upper left.     Wildly enough, though, this appears to be the only Ioun item in the game that actually works, granting my regent caster another two levels from 13 to 15.  Checking our points, something is definitely odd. Our collected artifacts seem to be counted, but they don't actually seem to be represented on the bars. Either way, about a third of the way to the Iron Throne!   I vassalize Baruk-Azhik and do another adventure while waiting for those drat forts to crumble.       Nhoun must've been pretty surprised when we just warped right in front of him and then blasted his head off with a Cone of Cold.    I make better friends with Rhoubhe and effortlessly crush another of the Gorgon's armies, ho hum.  One of the forts finally collapses.    This one is about the clearest example of the bad objective markers so far.  I think "oh, this is a pretty clear marker, I've got spare teleports, I'll just hit these treasure rooms first." and warp to the upper left tower.   And then the crown's loving there instead. This loving game.  This is one of those special artifacts worth extra points according to the manual, 30 in this case rather than the usual 10.    Still having some waiting to do, and a huge economic and regency surplus, I decide to spend it just buying up provinces from my poorly-fortified neighbours.       The Gorgon and Mur-Kilad keep trying to dislodge me, and it keeps not working because mage and cleric support trumps pretty much anything anyone can bring to the field, and the AI very rarely brings those things. Plus when they do, they often roll them out in the front row rather than the second row, meaning they get rushed and pinned down by cavalry and then usually killed, and the game actually has a finite amount of casters. The Lieutenant pool doesn't replenish, battlefield-dead characters can't be revived, and there are only so many regents.    This adventure is so loving weird. I actually had to try it multiple times because of how badly placed the quest marker was, and for some reason Rhuobhe Manslayer is just walking around in here as a random encounter. It feels like the description for the adventure is wrong or like it was mis-linked to the wrong map or something. Either way.  Rather than being at the objective marker or that very treasure room-y place on the right, it's actually the little room with the circular structure taking up most of it in the upper row. Do teleport to the right-side treasure room, though, it has a ton of spellbooks, one of which taught Aelis the skeleton-producing spell.     Free wardrobe upgrade, yoink.    Either as a result of Aelies being high-level(16th) or Sielwode having access to tier 6 Sources, or both, each casting, which as I'll note is effectively free since I do it as his lieutenant action rather than my regent's, generates ten skeleton units, compared to Rogr's end-game production of five or six per cast.     This adventure outright lies, you don't actually need to kill all those wraiths, just to get the objective item. Which, once again, is located nowhere near the marker, but instead practically dead center of the map.     Easily grabbed once you know that little detail.    I alchemize a ton of regency into gold and buy up most of Coeranys while Aelies produces more and more skeletons.    Then I declare war to take the rest of it. As an interesting note, if you buy a province that has troops in it, you get those troops. I wonder what would happen if you lure an enemy regent out of their capital into an unforted province and then buy it. Knowing this game's jank, odds are you could literally buy their king.  Coeranys can, in any case, not really put up any real resistance to the endless skeleton hordes.   This adventure I couldn't figure out how to beat, it consists of three .WADs in a row, and it's apparently possible to reach the third one while missing the key needed to advance and so far none of my idiot wizards have learned Knock.   Just look at this poo poo.   In any case, buying up two-thirds of Coeranys and then attacking the rest has put us two-thirds of the way to victory. I line up the Chimaeron next since "Awnsleighen" lands are supposedly worth almost twice as many victory points per province as other nations' lands.    I vassalize Rhuobhe and then, while still sieging down Coeranys, slam down skeletons on every single Chimaeron province in the same turn. Checkmate, dickheads. I do feel slightly bad about this as the Chimaeron is one of the more interesting nations in Birthright, being ruled by an insane sorceress who turned herself into a shapeshifting monster in her pursuit of immortality(she also made a crazy frankenstein as part of this pursuit, he roams as a hero-ish sort of person), and the nation is actually ruled day-to-day by a council of regional mayors and chieftains since she's much too busy being insane and magical to do things like fiddle with laws and taxes. Anyway, it's skeleton land now.   Three turns later, Coeranys and the Chimaeron are now under the control of Sielwode. At this point I'm starting to run out of easy targets, Osoerde is mostly fortified, Baruk-Azhik is my ally and the Gorgon actually has troops.    Eh, let's see how Markazor stands up to a swarm of skeletons. Eat bone, goblins.   As usual, the moron Gorgon comes to play and gets his rear end kicked because he forgets the importance of bringing artillery and troops rather than just a general.   Thus handing me the win. Even without killing him, however, I was literally two captured provinces from winning, and all of this was accomplished with my only loss being, I believe, one or two units of elf cavalry. All in all, that took me about three hours of real-time play.
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Jul 6, 2022 11:54
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As I was reading that update, I was going, “wait, is this run literally going to be one update?” It’s kind of funny how broken and janky this mess is overall, but it’s kind of charming when you just decide to not remotely play fair?
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Jul 6, 2022 12:13
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That went well. Impressive use of the jank, for sure. I am mildly tempted to think about some CK mod to implement something similar but saner, while disregarding all the similar but saner things that already exist.
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Jul 6, 2022 14:17
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Shei-kun posted:Also, you mentioned having a Rod of Resurrection, but would that let you res Hubaere after he died on the battlefield or is that just a "during an adventure" thing? Technically, dying AT ALL permanently passes your bloodline on to your heir (or the Land's choice if there is no ritually established heir), possibly losing some to bloodtheft if you got stabbed in the heart by another blooded individual, or all of it if you were slain with tighmaevril. Resurrection would restore him to life, but he would forever after be a Magician rather than a Mage (and iirc that is how he started so he may not even mind).
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Jul 6, 2022 14:23
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Hubaere was a cleric, so he'd not lose anything in that regard. If blooded, non-regents die without being "bloodthefted," they just die and their bloodline vanishes more or less. In this case I feel like upon resurrection they'd retain it. Regents with a designated heir don't pass on any bloodline strength, only their domain. Passing on the actual bloodline has to be a willing choice done while still alive, Investing it into someone else. Natural heirs by default inherit their parent's bloodline strength when born. As far as I can tell, the boxed set never addresses this specific issue, but in general the rule is that resurrected characters return to life as they were before they died, so as a GM I'd see no reason to keep the bloodline separate from that unless Bloodtheft happened when they died. Of course, their domain might've passed to an heir and they might have to convince them to hand it back, but not the bloodline.
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Jul 6, 2022 16:09
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I was kind of amused that the adventure for the Ioun Fist was in Rogr's castle. He finally got the single good one after collecting a huge pile of useless stones.
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Jul 6, 2022 17:08
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Alpha3KV posted:I was kind of amused that the adventure for the Ioun Fist was in Rogr's castle. He finally got the single good one after collecting a huge pile of useless stones. Rogr et al never realised it actually worked and thought it was just another useless one, it's why Noelon wasn't there trying to stop us getting it. (Well, that and he was busy petting things in his newly-painted bedroom.)
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Jul 6, 2022 17:38
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I remember a fun trick was if you had a ley line in somebody else's province, you could summon skeletons there and invest it without ever declaring war.
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Jul 6, 2022 18:53
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Achernar posted:I remember a fun trick was if you had a ley line in somebody else's province, you could summon skeletons there and invest it without ever declaring war. It's a shame the game never really requires tricks like that of the player or challenges them enough for it to be worthwhile, but yes, that's entirely possible.
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Jul 6, 2022 21:03
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It's a shame there's not any other games like this (at least that I can think of off the top of my head) that does kingdom management mixed with dungeon crawling for artifacts. It's an interesting idea, it's just a shame this one is such a buggy mess.
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Jul 6, 2022 21:12
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Randalor posted:It's a shame there's not any other games like this (at least that I can think of off the top of my head) that does kingdom management mixed with dungeon crawling for artifacts. It's an interesting idea, it's just a shame this one is such a buggy mess. Well, the Pathfinder PC games kinda do it.
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Jul 6, 2022 21:35
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It feels like most games that approach this have the dungeon crawling as the main focus and whatever kingdom management exists is largely grafted on in a supremely clunky way through dialogue interactions or some such rather than having its own dedicated interface. In any case, after one "fair" run and one "eat poo poo, game," I feel like that's it for The Gorgon's Alliance unless someone has something else they really want to see. Oh and then because I know I'm too stupid to take an extended break, I need to figure out what to LP next. The only games that really present themselves to me, though, are Divinity: Original Sin 2 as a vanilla run, Gothic 2 or Lands of Lore 3. The former as a non-jank game I actually enjoy, the latter two as mildly janky games that I feel like few people ever got to see. So I guess it depends on whether people want to see me suffer or whether they want to see me have fun. PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Jul 6, 2022 |
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Jul 6, 2022 21:35
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Have fun!
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Jul 6, 2022 21:53
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PurpleXVI posted:It feels like most games that approach this have the dungeon crawling as the main focus and whatever kingdom management exists is largely grafted on in a supremely clunky way through dialogue interactions or some such rather than having its own dedicated interface. Would you be interested in showing off or summarizing the realm and adventure spells, or is there just not much point? And I'd be down for seeing a Lands of Lore LP.
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Jul 6, 2022 21:57
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PurpleXVI posted:So I guess it depends on whether people want to see me suffer or whether they want to see me have fun. Given how much text I've been given to understand that Divinity: OS 2 has to then share, I'm not actually sure which of these is the "have fun" option for LPing.
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Jul 6, 2022 21:58
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Randalor posted:Would you be interested in showing off or summarizing the realm and adventure spells, or is there just not much point? Well part of the problem is that you have already seen the Realm spells that are useful: Legion of the Dead, always Alchemy, sometimes Cleric realm spells primarily provide economic boosts which... aren't really all that necessary. Other mage realm spells require large amounts of setup and ley lines to blow up an enemy army or the like when you could just... flood them with skeletons, my good gamer. As for adventure spells... most of them suck poo poo. In part due to unimplemented mechanics. Like... some of them seem to barely do any damage, like Ice Storm, others are lacking core features, like how Chain Lightning doesn't "chain." mage defensive spells are pointless either because they protect against magic, which no enemy uses, or you're drowning in +X protective gear anyway. And I think some offensive spells like Disintegrate are just plain bugged because in 10-ish casts I never got it to actually affect any enemies. Others suck poo poo because they do worse versions of what other spells already do. The only spells you will want to cast are the Cheaty Trio(True Seeing, Locate Object, Teleport), Knock, Fly/Levitate and spells that kill things. disposablewords posted:Given how much text I've been given to understand that Divinity: OS 2 has to then share, I'm not actually sure which of these is the "have fun" option for LPing. I would likely record the particularly important/cutscene dialogue and then paraphrase much of the remainder if I can't find a script dump, because there are limits to my self-loathing.
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Jul 6, 2022 22:15
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PurpleXVI posted:Some of these mages are also charity cases, like Hermedhie, an 8th-level mage whose only combat spells are Magic Missile and "Moraeulfs Poison Arrow," which seems to be an odd and pointless mangling of Melf's Acid Arrow. Betrayal at Krondor came out in 1993 and this game came out in 1996. I suspect that spell name isn't an odd mangling of Melf's Acid Arrow and is instead someone sneaking a BaK easter egg into the game.
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Jul 6, 2022 22:58
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Any chance of doing a high-difficulty and/or gimmick run, Purple? I find this strangely fascinating.
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Jul 6, 2022 23:05
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Randalor posted:It's a shame there's not any other games like this (at least that I can think of off the top of my head) that does kingdom management mixed with dungeon crawling for artifacts. It's an interesting idea, it's just a shame this one is such a buggy mess. Lords of Magic was a fun game that did some of this.
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Jul 6, 2022 23:15
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PurpleXVI posted:Words about Oof, that's really unfortunate to hear.
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Jul 6, 2022 23:52
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JustJeff88 posted:Any chance of doing a high-difficulty and/or gimmick run, Purple? I find this strangely fascinating. Are we talking about TGA or my suffering being fascinating in some other context? I suppose the high-difficulty run of The Gorgon's Alliance would be playing as a Fighter or Rogue and refusing to recruit any clerics or mages, making the whole thing into a pure economics sim(and also making like half the dungeons unsolveable, or at least unsolveable without an extremely high pain threshold). Of course, it would also likely be insanely dull to just mindlessly mash piles upon piles of pixelmans together since about the only tactical depth you're allowed is where your wizards get blasting during the fights. Having no Clerics would also require absurd numerical superiority to reliably chew through the Gorgon's swarms of skeletons.
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Jul 7, 2022 01:28
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Night10194 posted:Lords of Magic was a fun game that did some of this. Thank you very much for this. I've been trying to remember this game on-and-off for several years now as I occasionally see references to "Master of Magic" and confuse it with that game.
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Jul 7, 2022 01:32
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Night10194 posted:Lords of Magic was a fun game that did some of this. iirc the dungeon crawling was just the real-time battles
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Jul 7, 2022 01:57
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PurpleXVI posted:Are we talking about TGA or my suffering being fascinating in some other context? I mostly meant starting with a weak faction, which you perhaps already did, but I see your point. Given that this game is a bit like Dungeon Hack in that it lends itself to many playthroughs with different classes and settings, I thought that there might be another interesting gimmick to explore. Dungeon Hack, incidentally, would be another good time to try.
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Jul 7, 2022 02:28
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OneWingedDevil posted:Thank you very much for this. I've been trying to remember this game on-and-off for several years now as I occasionally see references to "Master of Magic" and confuse it with that game. God, Master of Magic was such an amazing game for its time, even with the occasional bug. My favorite was making artifact creation glitch out and give you an artifact with 5+ effects and sometimes the stat bonuses would be like +111 resist or something, not that you really *needed* to do it since if you were making custom top-tier artifacts for some of the better champions they were already nigh-unkillable one-unit armies in their own right.
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Jul 7, 2022 04:52
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PurpleXVI posted:It feels like most games that approach this have the dungeon crawling as the main focus and whatever kingdom management exists is largely grafted on in a supremely clunky way through dialogue interactions or some such rather than having its own dedicated interface. I had no idea there's a lands of lore 3!
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Jul 7, 2022 05:06
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Yeah I don't see anything more useful to be seen from Birthright. As for the next, I guess an anti-vote for Divinity 2? Each time there's been an LP, I just kind of deflect off of it hard, which doesn't say good things about my interest there. I don't know the other two.
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Jul 7, 2022 07:27
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I would love to vote for Lands of Lore 3, but I'd want to see you play 1 and 2 first for ~~completion~~ (and because 1 is a genuinely good game, at least) Failing that, Divinity 2.
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Jul 7, 2022 07:34
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Lands of Lore sounds interesting, especially as someone who's only really familiar with Westwood from their RTS games.
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Jul 7, 2022 08:46
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Black Robe posted:I would love to vote for Lands of Lore 3, but I'd want to see you play 1 and 2 first for ~~completion~~ (and because 1 is a genuinely good game, at least) 1 has already been competently LP'd and I hate 2. 2 is, like a lot of other games I've LP'ed now that I realize it, from the mid/late 90's where it's using technologies that haven't quite been figured out yet, and it's just... it's a janky loving mess. Plus even for its time it looked like absolute dogshit.
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Jul 7, 2022 09:12
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PurpleXVI posted:1 has already been competently LP'd and I hate 2. 2 is, like a lot of other games I've LP'ed now that I realize it, from the mid/late 90's where it's using technologies that haven't quite been figured out yet, and it's just... it's a janky loving mess. Plus even for its time it looked like absolute dogshit. It has, but it's not archived, and the image host the thread used is dead. Hard to enjoy a screenshot LP with no screenshots. Agreed on 2 though.
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Jul 7, 2022 13:50
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