Strategy & Wargames - middlebrow autodidact "history buffs" who yearn to pull levers

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > Strategy & Wargames - middlebrow autodidact "history buffs" who yearn to pull levers

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Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
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Tankbuster posted:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/developer-diary-division-commanders-unit-medals.1538205/

well well well, look whos come crawling back.

the best part of this change is not having to save-scum or edit the save file anymore to not have generals with duplicate portraits

# ¿ Aug 17, 2022 01:52

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# ¿ May 13, 2024 03:47

Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
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gradenko_2000 posted:

Caesar III had the basic formula down, but it didn't have roadblocks, which were such a critical aspect of how the game worked with its randomly-wandering service providers that you can never go back without it. Further, the victory conditions were all basic prosperity metrics, which were fine, but could have been better.

there is a mod (augustus) that ads roadblocks and a bunch of other' stuff to C3

DDRJake streams C3 from time to time, but with a related mod (julius) that just ads some QOL without changing the gameplay
while the walker system looks awful to play with watching someone who knows the game very well use it to beat the very hard maps people send him is interresting

# ¿ Aug 26, 2022 19:10

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Tankbuster posted:

There's a 4 hour stream on paradox's channel if you want to play hooky at work.

As for strategy games go, a big shout out to the europa barbarorum for Rome 1. The very definition of a labour of love. Even the corny voice acting with bargain bin microphones had it's moments.

there is also europa barbarorum 2 for medieval 2. which adds a lot of factions and other systems (like colonization) but does suffer from the same issues medieval 2 does when it comes to battles

one of the things i really miss from the older total war games is the trade system, watching all those little boats and carts go around is kinda satifying and made it feel more alive, especially when playing kart-hadast

Megamissen has issued a correction as of 22:32 on Aug 31, 2022

# ¿ Aug 31, 2022 22:30

Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
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units being tied to armies, lack of walls on most settlements (and even the walled ones not having to be sieged a turn), and the ai doomstacking from turn one made rome 2 very unfun for me
it made leaving a cost-effective garrison in outlying areas while campaigning elsewhere impossible
before it came out my plan was to have my armies spread out and named after the region they were protecting, but nope had to doomstack myself

shogun 2 handled it very well, it had a nice progression from small armies to full armies and eventually late game doomstacks

# ¿ Sep 2, 2022 10:51

Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
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gradenko_2000 posted:

- the resource minigame feels really good: it's almost like a turn-based Age of Empires where you need food, stone, wood, and iron to build all the stuff you need, which means you need to balance farms, quarries, lumber mills and iron mines so that you have enough income. Running into a bottleneck where you can't build more spearmen because you don't have enough iron banked makes the "early game" (insofar as The Old World is purely the "early game" of a full Civ timeline) much more involved

- the worker mechanics feel smooth as butter: what irritated me about later Civ games was that they tried way too hard to "gamify" how workers... work, and so you get all of these weird offshoots where you can't build roads at-will, or the Worker builds things instantly but the Worker dies after three improvements, and other poo poo like that. Old World throws you back to just "put the worker in a tile, make him build a thing, he will build it after a few turns" and that's that

- even the Orders mechanic is mind-blowing in that it deliberately limits your focus such that A. you can never get too overwhelmed with too much to do on any one turn, and B. not being able to do everything actually ends up being a balancing factor in and of itself, where you sometimes have to choose between ordering your workers around, ordering troops in the rear to rush to the front, and ordering around the troops at the front itself

dont forget that improvements cost resourses aswell, and workers can be turned into militia units in a emergency
its impressive how they solved the problems with workers in civ games, unlike civ 6 that just made it bad

the one issue with the whole resource and orders system is that you can buy an unlimited amount of resourses
just buying 600 stone to build a wonder instead of having to save up feel a bit.... unwondrous?
other than that it all comes togeather really well

there is somethign wierd about the late game units though, you get legionarie looking swordsmen and cataphracts... but then longbowmen, crossbowmen and pikemen with morion helmets?
maybe they originally planned for a longer timespan and kept some assets they had already made

# ¿ Sep 15, 2022 19:09

Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
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i would really like to see research changed in hoi4
like, the research should be done by design companies rather than them fuctioning as just some bonuses
all the different research options competing for the same slots just feels very gamey (focus trees also have this problem)
it would allow a lot more to be done the research since it would just have to be balanced by category, you could add smaller things like uniforms in Rt56 and not have to chose between that and a new fighter
you could also model the starting situations a lot better than just having different amounts of slots and unlocked techs, like a country could start with competetive tanks but a less advanced tank designer so they will fall behind unless large investments are made
it would also limit cheese like rushing sub4s

Mans posted:

no one plays until the end date anyways

wrong
even went into the game files and changed the end date to finish a war againt britain over the control over the great plains as japan

# ¿ Sep 26, 2022 23:01

Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
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i really wish shadow empire had mod support, the 'empire' part of the game is very underdeveloped
adding some more customization (like name lists) and making a better politics system would improve it a lot
currently massacring your striking workers has less impact on your ideology numbers than choosing what kind of specialist dude one of your battalions should get

# ¿ Nov 5, 2022 18:46

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PoontifexMacksimus posted:

middlebrow autodidact "history buffs" who yearned to pull designated levers and watch their blob encompass toponyms they could feel proud for recognising

# ¿ Nov 22, 2022 01:53

Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
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you would have to get it just right though or it just becomes frustrating
i have tried to do a no micro playthrough of hoi4 a few times but i always end up mircoing like 5 minutes into the first war

# ¿ Nov 23, 2022 00:18

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Tankbuster posted:

I just wanted the reworked india mang. Oh well, another L-KMT run it is.

fixed

the argentinian communist failson is also good

# ¿ Dec 13, 2022 01:12

Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
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you also have a nice final boss (the legation cities joining japans faction and not noticing until you get the 'fall of nanjing' news event)

# ¿ Dec 13, 2022 02:02

Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
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Parakeet vs. Phone posted:

Empire's a very neat, incredibly janky game that goes on sale a lot and is easily worth the few bucks.

its funny how the iroquis end up owning a random european province most of the time

i found a mod that had great unit rosters for the eastern factions but trying it out after playing darthmod... the vanilla combat felt so bad that i had to stop

# ¿ Jan 11, 2023 02:15

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Lostconfused posted:

The only thing I know about a bayonete is from whatever was in those Sharpe novels.

Mainly that muskets were just couldn't hit anything most of the time, and if you are close enough to hit someone then you're probably close enough to stick them with a bayonet too, especially if they were too busy loading that ball and cartridge.

Which is the only reason I even ended up playing Empire Total War. Which amounted to me getting together as much line infantry together as I could and shooting the other side until a single charge would break them and then you just let the cavalry clean up.

Also just fight with an overwhelming number superiority so you don't have to think too hard about some brilliant tactics.

Never did figure out how to use skirmishers.

both in empire and in fall of the samurai the ai had trubble even forming a line instead sort of bunching up at the center, never had to change my strategy from 'form a big line and envelop the enemy'

# ¿ Feb 10, 2023 12:58

Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
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civ 6 improved the unit lines a lot over 5

the spearman line in 5 (with expansions) is very awkward, it goes from spearmen -> pikemen (both your standard non-iron infantry with bonus against mounted) -> lancers (anti-mounted mounted unit, needs horses) -> anti-tank gun (back to infantry movement, big bonus against tanks but underpowered otherwise) -> attack helicopter (bonus against tanks, weak to anti air, fast and has a unique movement type, needs aluminium)

so you go from two slow defensive units to a fast offensive one but then back to a defensive slow one, to a fast offensive one again
and the gap between getting the lancer and the atg is very big so you end up having lancers past the point of being usefull... only to get a unit thats kinda bad

vanilla had its own weirdness with pikemen, crossbowmen, longswordsmen and musketmen all turing into riflemen, so riflemen upgraded from pikes would just be better since they kept their anti-cavalry promotion and rifles from crossbows would be the worst since their ranged attack promotions would do nothing
i think it had some dead-end units aswell, i vaguely remember the lancer not upgrading into anything but im not sure

# ¿ Mar 11, 2023 17:19

Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
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the placement of corinth in stainless steel i bothering me a lot

# ¿ Apr 13, 2023 22:13

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Tankbuster posted:

Never got the TNO meme. It turns the entire game into a VN where you occasionally play another minigame. Kaiserreich for all it's memetic politics actually does cool stuff. The USA thunderbowl actually lets you do cool stuff like mechanized midwestern cavalry and the LKMT earlygame is probably as close as HOI4 comes to showing what mao did in real life funnily enough.

reunifying the soviet union in tno is fun, you start out fighting over litteral scrap and things escalate nicely
last time i played was some time before the big economics update, have they added the second west russian war yet?

in general im not a fan of the minigames in hoi4 mods, they are often poorly designed (unless you were picking the obviously bad option in the english election minigame in tno you would get baath party numbers in the second election) or just tedious
event chains give a much tighter narative and also have the bonus that you can check the files to find out how to get a specific outcome if you want one (and edit percentage chance if there is a random element, i did that to make germany choose the option that allowed me to do hybrid system denmark i kaiserreich)

# ¿ Apr 22, 2023 00:11

Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
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you need tabletop simulator to playtest right?

# ¿ May 20, 2023 19:59

Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
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Typo posted:

I can't remember if Napoleon had it but one of the funniest features of total war games was where you get to manually aim artillery pieces from 1st person PoV

you could do it in fall of the samurai but i never used it since artillery is already accurate enough that learning how to aim was not worth it
artillery in fots was very over powered against the ai but due to some bug or something the guns targeted the right edge of a unit instead of the middle so to be the most efficient you had to target a unit with another unit to the right of it

# ¿ May 24, 2023 21:17

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Danann posted:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/489630/Warhammer_40000_Gladius__Relics_of_War/ - Warham Gladius is available free until June 1. It's an AoW-type game but Warhams.

played it for a few hours and its pretty neat, i really like how if you rename a units the name shows up above it
though it has the same effect as hoi4 where i get so absorbed in it i forget to eat

# ¿ May 29, 2023 00:04

Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
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Zeppelin Insanity posted:

Imagine my disappointment going from Medieval, in which sieges starved defenders and also attrited attackers every turn, to Medieval 2, where not only did that not happen, but also the AI would always force a battle on the last turn. Thus, the whole "siege for several turns" thing was an utterly pointless waste of time instead of a legitimate strategy.

ive been playing a lot of medieval 2 recently and found the opposite
especially in the early-game scramble for rebel settlements being able to send just enough units to defeat the garrison when they sally instead of having to send more (and take heavier losses) to assault allows you to be a lot more efficient with your limited amount of units

# ¿ May 30, 2023 16:30

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Tankbuster posted:

people hated when CA reintroduced attrition for attackers in rome 2.

combined with instant assaults and the doom stacking there was no reason to ever siege
if you had to siege a number of turns depending on the defenses before being able to assault it could have been interesting

# ¿ May 30, 2023 22:03

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The Chad Jihad posted:

They brought back matched unit combat animations, weird nostalgic feeling watching melee footage

What's most interesting to me is that they are giving combat stances some units. So if you set a unit to retreat stance, it will still face and fight their enemy but will back up as they do so. And then theres stances to push the enemy, try not to move at all, just do whatever, etc. That combined with units being a bit tankier and morale seeming to be a bit more important could give the game a unique feel

I imagine it'll be like the unit weight class in Troy where it was mostly ignorable but I'm still pretty intrigued and I'm a total war simp anyways

the combat stances seems very cool, a thought i had recently was that the tw games could use a discipline/drill stat changes how quick they can change formation/redeploy (would be a bigger thing in the line infantry games) but it could also be useful for this

have any recent total war game moved away from units being tied to armies, allowing you to put an extra garrison somewhere or send a detachment without having to commit one of your limited armies?

# ¿ Jun 1, 2023 17:10

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Tankbuster posted:

yeah, I remember back in the rome 2 days, medieval 2's weird pathfinding glitches were seen as IMMERSIVE by TWCenter.

units being dumb on walls is an immersive representation of the lower oxygen levels at higher altitudes and/or acrophobia

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

They had that stat since Medieval 2 at least. It's one of those ideas that sounds interesting but in practice it just makes some units feel sluggish if you really look at them.

did some light testing comparing a peasant unit and an armoured sergeants unit, at the start of the formation change there is a big difference but the peasant catch up a lot after that so it ends up not being that big

# ¿ Jun 1, 2023 20:05

Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
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Orange Devil posted:

So anyone want to play some games?

im putting some dota 2 items up on the market so ill probably buy tabletop simulator tomorrow

# ¿ Jun 3, 2023 23:43

Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
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the board for unnamed fulda game feel a bit cramped, reading the rules it seems like you are allowed to have multiple units on the same tile but theres only one 'slot' so you have to stack the cards which makes it a bit awkward
im not very good at using tts yet to maybe thats the issue

how are you organising matches, did you just add each other on steam or is there a discord or something?

# ¿ Jun 4, 2023 14:46

Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
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shadow empire lacks the production part of logistics, as long as you have the resources you can instantly create as many tanks you want
it would be neat if you had to create armouries and foundries to produce weapons and ammunition

# ¿ Jun 5, 2023 15:17

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Lum_ posted:

sabaton in general is pretty questionable, they love them some wehrmacht

they're also big on putin and performed a concert for the night wolves, putin's favorite motorcycle gang, in occupied crimea

sabaton is a band of contrast

# ¿ Jun 7, 2023 20:32

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what settings are best for the pop growth modifiers they added, played a game recently and my planets after the initial 3 barely grew at all

# ¿ Jun 13, 2023 23:59

Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
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is age of wonders 4 good?

# ¿ Jun 18, 2023 18:27

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aow 4 not having a proper campaign is a bit dissapointing but thinking about it a lot of the mechanics just arent well suited to making one
the province system (which i like a lot, it allows you to create pretty internal borders), very limited healing outside your own territory, stacks moving slowly on the campaign map
they make sense and are balanced for skirmishes but make creating a good campaign scenario with exploration and adventuring very hard unless you change all of them
like, give cities a limited area they are allowed to expand to like what you naturally get in the underground (youd probably need to restrict city founding aswell) and add more healing/movement on the campaign map

they are apparently adding a dreadnought-like class in the next dlc which i am exited for, it was my favorite one in 3
the changes to ancient wonders means i cant do my strategy of sending wave after wave of suicide drones to weaken high-tier ones enough to be able to take them early though

also, played some unnamed fulda game with orange devil like two weeks ago and it was a lot of fun
we first played two matchups of the infantry deck
first game i played the pact motor rifle deck and ended up with a clear loss, it was my first game so not unexpected (zeppelin insanity gave me a lot of advice through out all 4 games which mitigated my inexperience a lot)
second game i played the us infantry deck and having gained some experience and playing a defence focused deck that suited me it ended up very close (i dont remember who won it though lol)

next we played the two tank decks with me starting with nato this time
third game i made a big mistake where i forgot to put a unit in my backline and made an illegal deployment, realized it after my turn was over and effectivly lost a crucial turn that allowed him to take a very important tile and put me on the backfoot for the rest of the game as i tried to retake it with costly counterattacks that he could reverse on his turn
still ended up relatively close in the end
forth and final game very exciting and after breaking through his frontline i repetedly pushed into his backline and was beaten back every time with heavy losses on both sides (i got a lot of value out of the 1 damage mortar card) but i retained the initiative
then when it was nearing the end steam had network issues and we were all kicked out of the session lol
i would probably have won though so im taking it as a victory

while the tank deck matchup produced more exciting and fast games with a lot of spearhead pushes and counterattacks the us infantry deck was my favorite, i like the defensive playstyle i has

if anyone else wants to play you can add zeppelin (Xan, with the tf2 engineer avatar) on steam and he can set up a session

# ¿ Jun 30, 2023 23:17

Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
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have you made any changes to the pact tank deck?
i would suggest making the pontoon bridge cards in adition to its current use on the river terrain also reduce the penalty on the bridge terrain
currently they feel a bit too situational

Zeppelin Insanity posted:

t's a very good idea. I want to do one or two playtests as is, then give that a try.

if you see me online on steam and need someone to play feel free to ask

---

with how many city builders are coming out im surprised that none of them try to do the same concept towns did
it was one of the earliest early access games on steam i think and one of the first scandals as the developers abandoned it and ran away with the money which is sad, i loved the concept
it was kinda like a tristram simulator, you built your town on top of a giant cave/dungeon and heroes would come and explore, fight, and loot and use the services you built up in your town similar to majesty

# ¿ Jul 4, 2023 14:31

Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
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Orange Devil posted:

Majesty owns, and the fact that nobody ever did anything similar (don't talk about Majesty 2) is real weird.

That said, Against the Storm is my favorite city builder in a very long time.

i never played majesty (seems very stressfull, have watched someone play though) but having little guys you can watch run around and fight on their own is very entertaining
adding a customizable name list (or custom hero creation if they have traits and/or visual customization) would be a good adition, especially for streamers

# ¿ Jul 4, 2023 14:51

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AARP LARPer posted:

Something something chess

something something flower arraingement

# ¿ Jul 7, 2023 00:45

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the engineer was better in 1

# ¿ Jul 18, 2023 13:37

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skooma512 posted:

Even harder than XN1?

I guess the target market is Xcom grognards but I didn't even get past the first level of XN and would have refunded it if it wasn't too late.

that sounds more like a knowledge issue than a skill issue, like you didnt get how you were supposed to play and were running your guys around way too agressivly
something that can be fixed by watching someone else play for a bit
it could also just be that you got very unlucky

# ¿ Jul 18, 2023 19:03

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Regarde Aduck posted:

i'm surprised we discussed why xcom is problematic and didn't mention that your head scientist's personality seems to be a weird pastiche of Mengele

thats in the first new xcom, in xcom 2 the scientist is a burger guy

# ¿ Jul 20, 2023 23:07

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Regarde Aduck posted:

oh yeah i forgot she is written out

i vaguely remember they imply she is working with the aliens or something

# ¿ Jul 20, 2023 23:09

Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
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Typo posted:

starfield is garbage that is all

Tankbuster posted:

I have terrible news. Starfield is pretty good.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2023 11:07

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Raskolnikov38 posted:

you get planning bonuses that give a boost to your attack. you dont actually need to press the launch plan button and can just manually launch attacks and get the bonus but you do need to draw an offensive line somewhere

you have to use a frontline to set up an offensive line, and using frontlines for your breakthrough divisions is not ideal
you can set one up, let the planning build up then delete it when you start the attack but i remember the planning draining very fast if you do
worth it for the start of an offensive i guess but after that better to just leave them un-frontlined and micro instead

# ¿ Oct 24, 2023 03:38

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# ¿ May 13, 2024 03:47

Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
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FirstnameLastname posted:

you can micro w planning by connecting sequential orders and selectively activating them (hit tab when drawing offensive arrows to change their point of origin, hold alt to move their path around, shift or ctrl click to activate individual orders)

you can have a billion diff orders painted at the division level & only assign certain divs to each it doesn't have to be a full army

true but its a pain to set up and manually microing is a lot stronger in the exploitation phase

# ¿ Oct 25, 2023 16:58

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > Strategy & Wargames - middlebrow autodidact "history buffs" who yearn to pull levers

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