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I will pedantly raise my finger and push my greasy glasses up my nose and point out that like many pieces of media this game is deeply unfair to the dark ages which are mostly an age (much like the Greek dark age) of lack of documentation and not an age of living in dung themed trash fire. But it was definitely less pleasant to live in than the late Roman Empire, although serfs definitely had preferable living conditions compared to slaves, as a whole technology, and by this I mean the large scale organization, means both financial and manpower, and trade networks necessary, took a step back, while its purely intellectual knowledge didn't really slide back all that much, and of course there was technological progress in other areas. Also let's get the evil faction out of the way first, I'm sure there's an English campaign around the place somewhere.
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Mar 27, 2023 05:18
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It's my first time looking at the track names for the music and some of those are quite surprising.
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Mar 28, 2023 03:00
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It's the final stages of the French war of independence from the British Empire, it lasted about a hundred years. Poor France, so far from God, so close to the United Kingdom.
SIGSEGV fucked around with this message at 12:08 on Mar 31, 2023 |
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Mar 31, 2023 11:57
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It's also how the English discovered there were other ways to prepare food than boiling.
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Apr 1, 2023 02:07
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Sally posted:yeah Gilles de Rais shows up in the absurd Jeanne d'Arc PSP game where La Hire is also an anthropomorphic lion and Jeanne herself gets magic Sailor Moon-esque transformation powers to battle the literal demons that have taken over the English leadership. He is one of the main characters and is portrayed as heroic throughout the game until (endgame spoilers) you defeat the final boss. The ultimate evil cannot actually be destroyed so one of the main characters has to contain their power in their own bodies, a la the ending of Diablo 1. Jeanne (who has survived being burnt alive at this point because her friend who looks like her was executed in her place) offers to be the one, but Gilles stops her, heroically insisting he take the burden instead. The game ends with everyone happy the Ultimate Evil and the English have been stopped. There is a scene where Gilles looks pained and someone asks if he'll be okay and he's all like, "Yeah, naw, I got this" and then the game just kinda ends. I also played that game and that happening had me nodding my head wisely knowing what happened. Also the francisques that are the actual signature weapons of the axe throwers are single bladed, with the blade projecting a bit up and the haft has a weird shape, both to increase the chance of striking with the blade. The twin bladed design has no real origin that I can point at but is the one that was favored in fascist illustrations and took over the representation with time. At least I suppose that was the trajectory for that, it might not be. SIGSEGV fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Apr 1, 2023 |
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Apr 1, 2023 22:57
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anilEhilated posted:The Minoan labrys, although that was most likely just a ceremonial symbol. The labys obviously looks like the modern representation but also is a completely different weapon, I guess it is that historian's description bringing them together. Observed material culture does indicate the one bladed design with the upward to front dogleg design.
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Apr 2, 2023 00:39
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It's a monastery, and yes. Really running into scale issues there.
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Apr 2, 2023 16:55
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Osman I, the state is called Osmanli for a reason. Also the lack of sources means you can just make poo poo up.
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Apr 2, 2023 23:35
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A Barbarossa as well, it's fine to go in order and see how the devs start to push further what they dare do.
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Apr 21, 2023 02:08
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It is important to note that the HRE's nightmare internal structure made it difficult to do sane and theoretically easy things, in the Middle Ages and in the Early Modern period, for example we have infinite battles over taxes and in the long and numerous wars with the Ottoman Empire we have things like the impossibility to maintain towing paths along the entirety of the Danube because some local lord doesn't want to and through a thousand negotiations and compromises to allow power to even exist, he can't legally be overruled and doing it would be an effective constitutional crisis. I never looked too closely at those roofs about twenty years ago, I though they were just oddly rough and it was probably because of extensive patching, so I though they were poor quality shale roofs.
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Apr 24, 2023 21:28
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I see the Palmyrans and I make a minor lol, but well, they do have one moment of critical relevance.
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Apr 26, 2023 00:11
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They have the Palmyrans in but not Canaanites nor the Mittani, or the Hatti, and Caesar doesn't have Gauls or Celts to fight. I foresee many an expansion pack. E: ^^ I am downloading AoE1: DE as I edit this. EE: To my shock and horror, Palmyrans appear to have been in AoE1, which just goes to show how much I should trust my sponge brain. SIGSEGV fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Apr 26, 2023 |
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Apr 26, 2023 00:23
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I get AoE focusing on the Eastern Med and Mesopotamia for its bronze age and early iron age focus, dumping the Romans, Etruscans and Celts and such, it makes sense, it's a place where we actually have a lot of documentation, such that a big problem is that there's not enough translators. But having only one civ for the levantine coast, and a fairly minor one at that, that was added in an expansion pack, for the grounds where the Hittites and Egypt are having their great pissing match over ten thousand vassals (with Extremely Significant intrusions by the (Neo-)Assyrians and (Neo-)Babylonians), that is a weird choice.
SIGSEGV fucked around with this message at 01:12 on Apr 26, 2023 |
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Apr 26, 2023 01:08
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Viking are also notable for being the civ involved in all fatslob matches, black forest, vikings only, set the next six hours aside.
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Apr 30, 2023 01:11
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Ah, one of those missions in which we fight for ontological evil, there's a whole campaign, too. In real life, yeah, the French army's options were all bad and they proceeded with the least bad one and well, it was a dark day for humanity. I suppose they had a good reason for not backing off that day, I'm less familiar with the details than the commanders in charge at the time.
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May 3, 2023 02:02
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Jossar posted:D. Sargon of Akkad - Sumerians Sickening. Let's go for it anyway.
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May 13, 2023 03:16
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They could have made him Babylonian, still very, very funny but at least it would be the right connections. Or they could follow broadly historical Ur I and II, or even Ur III, we know about those.
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May 13, 2023 11:37
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Asehujiko posted:AoE1 is no stranger to very weird civ choices. Huns represented by Hittites come to mind. I guess they share a sound? There's no civ to play the Huns while Babylonians could be used since they share the culture and language. Other baffling things are the way the architecture sets are handed out but I suppose you have to use the Egyptian set after making it and there's too many civs that would fit the Mesopotamian set.
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May 13, 2023 17:49
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A. Attila the Hun They have funny shaped heads.
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May 20, 2023 19:15
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Ah, Journey to the West is a classic. Oh, wait, it's not that one, it's not that one at all.
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May 21, 2023 18:54
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B the man who would to be
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Jun 9, 2023 16:51
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F. Yodit.
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Jun 29, 2023 04:28
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Gonna go with B.
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Sep 3, 2023 16:09
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Sure, let's see A. I like the ending at least in spirit, "and in practice it just meant the crows were well fed" is an important part of understanding a succession war.
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Sep 10, 2023 13:09
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That mission didn't seem particularly inspired, true. Also you just got an injection of three new campaigns.
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Nov 5, 2023 01:23
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F Cumans.
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Nov 5, 2023 22:29
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quote:An interesting fact to note though, is that this mission and the next one are paralleled in the Rajendra campaign later on in Dynasties of India, where you play as the Chola instead. That's cute, I like that. Ultimately there's a limited number of viable scenarios they can play out so I don't mind repetition too much so long as it's an interesting mission type with a couple wrinkles thrown in, even if they start to repeat themselves, so long as the combination is different.
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Nov 10, 2023 00:32
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E Cumans. Wonder victories are legitimate victories, they certainly count for enemies in campaigns so there's no shame in using them when given.
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Nov 12, 2023 02:13
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That was a neat campaign, all in all.Technowolf posted:A. Let's finish off Southeast Asia.
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Nov 20, 2023 10:50
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I was busy and almost missed the start of the elemental evil campaign. I'm also still reading, just not posting much because I don't really have much to add.
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Jan 27, 2024 23:53
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Ah, the other evil campaign. You know, I'm reading a book on war crimes and other crimes during the hundred years' war as documented through letters of grace for both members of armed forces and civilians. It gets rather grim. It seems that the French army professionalization was a success both at battlefield success and reducing criminal acts, while the Burgundian was less so, the English leave significantly less paper traces in a number of respects but while everybody seems to agree that all armed forces are bad to have around, the English are somehow worse.
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Mar 3, 2024 02:16
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The écorcheurs, or, literally, the skinners, are lovely fellows. Mostly, they are what happens when you have mercenaries and stop paying them, either because you ran out of cash or the contract ran out and they decided that actually it should keep going and you should keep paying them. They pay themselves from the local population, their subtle moniker might imply they are awful, it is correct. They generally demand to be paid off to leave and might not hold up their end of the agreement when paid. Another source of écorcheurs are various former soldiers, especially demobilized en masse after a campaign, who have realized that they will go back to being poor (for nobles and peasants alike, just differing standards that merge when you get really low on the nobility scale), and this is easy work and pays well and they don't have to walk all the way home. Various solutions are tried against both of them, violence works, but rehiring them when possible also works, requires a lot less state violence and enhances state violence against the English and Burgundians. The unpaid soldier variant gradually falls in number to not negligible but manageable levels as the French army professionalizes, the mercenary variant kept happening regularly all over Europe until large mercenary forces fell out of fashion, everyone hated mercenaries and for excellent reasons.
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Mar 3, 2024 23:37
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And that was the other evil campaign. A lot of blood, sweat and tears to get rolled over later.
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Apr 21, 2024 20:26
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