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PurpleXVI posted:I was going to say that cows sounded like the optimal option because of the passive food generation from dairy and the not resistance to fertility changes. I would say it's the primary one, but there are reasons to not want to always rely on it. Being deliberately vague since we haven't gotten to those mechanics yet, and I prefer to deal with them in a proper update. Quackles posted:When is the right time for allocating serfs to reclaim fields? There are edge cases, but 90%+ of the time I would say as soon as you have free labor that isn't needed for food-related work.
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May 6, 2023 16:07
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Balance is difficult, but sheep can be worthwhile for the wool production as well. Young me had a lot of fun trying to balance my crops
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May 7, 2023 14:33
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The Early Years: Stabilizing Gloucestershire AD 1268-1269  Progressing through the turns/seasons happens at the Kingdom Level. On the far right, the display alternates every few seconds between the currently active player and the current game date. Just to the left of that is the active player's shield. Clicking on this ends your turn, which ... is not exactly obvious. It takes only a second or two for each player's actions to pass at first, but it will be much longer later once they start raising armies and such.  It's never a good time for rats, but we don't our grain disappearing when we're trying get our feet under us. The big one humorously chomping down with full cheeks on his meal looks borderline malevolent.  On the other hand, the backbreaking work in the fields looks like it's about to get results. Took most of the county working on it for half a year, but it's still progress.  Some good and some bad news in Autumn.  The hit to happiness is the only thing superstition does, but it's bad enough. Rations and health are driving that south fast enough without help from ill omens. Good thing it's harvest time also, as our grain stockpile is looking rather meager. I also like the fact that there's a different border color scheme and also image of the county at the top for each season. Nice detail.  Look at the amount in our grain field. It was 36 before, but got a slight boost from the Bright weather.  Winter has now arrived. Observe that even our 'grain' field is listed as fallow, since harvest has happened but sowing the next year's crop has not. Worth remembering for when we rely on the Kingdom visuals to assess other counties in the future.  Sometimes there's a lot to be said for boredom compared to the alternative.  When food supply is tight, winter planting decisions can be difficult. It basically sets the agenda for the next year. Happiness is down to 14 and we've dropped a level to Ill Health; I pondered possibly using some of our grain for a season of Normal Rations, but decided against it. When possible, it's usually best to think long-term and invest in the future. 18 is the most we can plant; note that it's asking for 300 workers. That's because the maximum is 30 sacks of grain per field. Grudgingly, I address the situation by dropping taxes from 15 to 10 instead. As much as we need Crowns, I also don't want to let happiness drop too far.  This fine fellow is known simply as the Steward. He shows up with facts and figures annually by default; this can be adjusted to every 2 years, every 4 years, or Never. The comparisons here are to the last report, except in this case it's to game start. Anyway, this signifies that we've made it through a year. The archway exits the report, the right arrow shows us more ...  A series of rankings, starting with an overall one that aggregates the rest. The difference is larger than it might appear; our black flag is basically at minimum height, they will always be above the wall.  As the first player in line, the Baron 'wins' all ties. Nobody has a castle yet. Each item corresponds to one of the images at the bottom, which you click through to select the category. The other ones are most crowns, most counties, most troops, most people, and happiest people. Our takeaway from this is that we are behind the others economically (duh) and nobody has so much as raised an army yet. They will soon.  The final part of the annual review is some prominent noble or another saying words lauding their recent accomplishments/position, in this case the Earl. Usually it's similar to this, some variant on 'I'm going to win, just you wait'. Other communication will happen with our competition in the normal course of events beyond this optional annual statement.  Interestingly, we are not returned to the Kingdom Level but to the Realm after the reports conclude. Sort of an enforced 'don't forget about the big picture' idea perhaps? The only thing that's new here is we can see several merchants. Notably none are nearby; they only travel one county per season, so we won't be seeing any quite yet. Seems the Baron in the southwest there - Cornwall - got fortunate enough to have an early visit.  Baby boom is one of the best events to get, unless you have so many people you're struggling to feed them. I'll take it just for the +1 to happiness and the increase to the tax base.  Fertility is up to high, although it's a little late to benefit this year's crop much. The planting time is what matters. Still, we planted enough that it looks like we'll have a bigger harvest than last year, and another field is about to be reclaimed.  The Wolves event looks scary; and if we had sheep it might be. As is, all it gives us is the standard -1 happiness from most negative events.  Meh events for Autumn, but this is the first time we've seen this; there are nearby traders. Three of them! Some of their names, such as 'Bob the Shop', are chuckleworthy.  Confirming their locations on the map ... odds are high one of the three visits Gloucestershire next season. Note that there are never two traders in the same county at the same time, and they never stay in the same county for more than one season. You can get different ones in consecutive seasons though.  And there it is! The sight of that brown caravan at your town cross is a beautiful thing when you've been itching to conduct some business.  Religion is the best event I think in the 'people just feel more positive now' category. It's a +2 to happiness, and we surely need it. On the other hand, boo for the weather.  Time for actual trading! The different traders vary in a couple ways: - Availability. Some items can't be bought or sold from certain traders. Olde George here clearly prides himself on being willing to barter in any goods. - Relative Pricing. Some traders will charge higher or lower than average for specific items. Unfortunately this price is a bit on the high side for Cattle at 38 per head; others will sell in the low 30s. The available items are, from left to right: Cattle, Sheep, Grain, Wool, Ale, Iron, Stone, Timber, and Weapons. We know about the first three already. A brief introduction to the others: - Wool comes from sheep at the same time they reproduce. I think I did actually mention that already but a key point here is wool has no use other than to be sold. Supply and demand being what they are, that means over time the price tends to drop and sheep are more valuable earlygame than they are later. - Ale is kind of the opposite in terms of pricing, you can only buy it. Buy enough of it, and the happiness of the county directly improves. There is a limit of +3 per county, and you can't store it. Purchasing more Ale beyond that is just a waste of Crowns. If you have to turn a county's situation around in a hurry, it's basically the 'throw Crowns and diversions at the problem' approach. - Iron is used to make weapons. We'll be getting onto how that works before too much longer, but producing it and selling it or just buying the iron and making the weapons yourself as opposed to the more expensive option of buying weapons directly are possibilites. - Stone and Timber are used in building castles. Like Iron, they can be acquired and sold, or bought to save the effort of getting them ourselves. - Weapons are ... well, what they say they are, for outfitting armies. There are different kinds and if you choose to buy them you'll be prompted to choose which kind you want. Under the Gossip? button, Olde George says thusly:  Sometimes they give actually useful information. Sometimes they have nothing to say, and other times it's something like this which is flavor and has no actual gameplay impact. I almost feel like this needs a Morgan Freeman voiceover: 'The turnip's time had not, in fact, come'.  This of course is what we came here to do; throw all our Crowns at him and walk away with as many Cattle as possible.  Now we have the 'two-cow' picture. This status is reached when you exceed 10 cows per field. Note the difference between this, and when we spread them out by allocating another field:  Crop Rotation had reached four but is now down to two; if we had fewer fields reclaimed it'd be risky doing this. We also will grow the herd by 1, whereas before we split the herd it was no change. Once again going with using all available labor to plant grain.  Here is the payoff; we now have enough cattle to sustain Half Rations without consuming any grain at all, and enough grain to go to Normal Rations at least part of the time. That's quite important because after a couple of years of malnutrition, the people are Sick. That's one level up from Diseased, the worst state. Normal rations will reverse that trend, albeit slowly. With that in place and fertility on the rise, we are stable enough I think to boost taxes back to 15.  I'm assuming Health is the reason the Steward considers this a 'mixed' report. I think it's quite a good one. We've gotten our first trading in and stabilized our economy; it took two years to do it. Not a moment too soon either. The reports indicate the Bishop has built a castle and assembled an army, though nobody has expanded beyond their initial county yet. He also has this to say:  Others will assuredly follow suit. It appears that open war is upon us, whether we would choose it or not. Up Next: The War Begins
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May 7, 2023 15:23
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The Bishop... I hate him... and the Knight But also as can be seen, wool can be quite a good money maker and provide a lot of benefit to your economy... if you can keep it up.
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May 7, 2023 15:45
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AtomikKrab posted:The Bishop... I hate him... and the Knight
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May 7, 2023 15:49
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CptWedgie posted:Why be so specific? I hate all the rival nobles. Not just because they're enemies, but because they're jackasses about it. Oh I hate them all, but in particular the Bishop and the Knight.
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May 7, 2023 18:08
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And here I thought those breast hats in Blackadder II were just a random thing.
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May 7, 2023 18:26
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Another Strategic Sage LP where they break even more vintage games over their knees? You bet your rear end I'm excited for this. Also, it does seem a bit silly to spoiler things like "troop types" when A)I'm sure those were covered in the instruction manuals and B) You could just take a look at historical warfare to get an idea of what troops you would have access to. It's not like 3/4 of the way through the game, the isle of England is revealed to be the remains of an ancient spaceship, and suddenly you're dealing with laser swords and photon beam emitters, right? ...right?
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May 8, 2023 00:50
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Randalor posted:Also, it does seem a bit silly to spoiler things like "troop types" when A)I'm sure those were covered in the instruction manuals and B) You could just take a look at historical warfare to get an idea of what troops you would have access to. It's not like 3/4 of the way through the game, the isle of England is revealed to be the remains of an ancient spaceship, and suddenly you're dealing with laser swords and photon beam emitters, right? ...right? Sadly this isn't Might and Magic, I don't think we're going to chop off the Earl's face and reveal him to be an evil robot.
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May 8, 2023 01:03
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Don't be silly. Clearly it would be the Bishop, just look at that boobhat.
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May 8, 2023 01:41
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Randalor posted:It's not like 3/4 of the way through the game, the isle of England is revealed to be the remains of an ancient spaceship, and suddenly you're dealing with laser swords and photon beam emitters, right? ...right? Please tell me there's an old game where this actually happens.
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May 8, 2023 02:17
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Quackles posted:Please tell me there's an old game where this actually happens. As PurpleXVI alluded to, basically every Might & Magic game. At least up to 8; I don't really know the current parts of the series.
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May 8, 2023 04:28
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Felinoid posted:As PurpleXVI alluded to, basically every Might & Magic game. At least up to 8; I don't really know the current parts of the series. Post-8, the sci-fi elements disappear from the series entirely, and they were never part of the Heroes side of the franchise(were originally planned to, player base frothed at the mouth when it was suggested so developers had to rapidly backpedal which resulted in at least one rushed game).
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May 8, 2023 08:04
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Seeking Prosperity: Spring 1270-Autumn 1272 The start of 1270 had little to note; still trying to balance on a tightrope, rations flipped between half and normal, and taxes up and down a bit to compensate. And then ...  Plague is The Bad One (tm) when it comes to events. Three things happen when the plague strikes: - A number of people are just killed directly - Health takes a sizable hit - Happiness drops by 3. It always hurts, but in the wrong situation it's enough to turn a manageable county into one that's in serious trouble.  Our latest trader, Harry Nail. He has no news. You can see below that Harry is one of the traders who doesn't deal in certain commodities. Under the circumstances we definitely still need all the help we can get, so we purchase three more cattle.  Just enough workers left to optimize both the herd and the harvest.  The History display is sixth down on the County level, the one just above the exit archway. It displays details and a history graph that you can change the scale on for Population, Grain, Cattle, and Sheep. It doesn't tell us how many people the plague killed, but recently births had been consistently higher than deaths and here they are ... decidedly not. I'd estimate 30, give or take, succumbed to the disease. The immigration & emigration here is also very useful. Here for example it tells us that Wiltshire is doing pretty well, otherwhise people would be going somewhere else or staying up.  Little Frank is unfortunately pricey, but we have just enough to buy another head of Cattle. He also tells us that 'Everyone knows that the largest treasury belongs to the Countess'. As gossip goes, this isn't very helpful.  The recent unpleasantness means we have to choose what to prioritize. I end up going with a somewhat smaller planting effort than the last couple of years. Our herd of cattle is starting to grow more consistently and I want to keep that moving. Food supplies have reached the point where we can now sustain Normal Rations. That means it's time to focus on growing our population. From a start of 200, we've increased to 300 but we need to grow faster and larger than that before we can entertain more lofty ambitions. To achieve this, taxes will stay at their current low level of 10 to gradually increase our happiness & health until we flip from having a few people leave the county every season to having them immigrate from somewhere else.  Grain specifically is what is lost in fires, along with a -1 to Happiness.  We have now reached maximum Fertility. We can tell this by the number of sacks of grain in the field compared to what we planted, which was 14. 10x is the most you can get. Note that the manual is wrong on a couple of things in this area, it apparently was written before farming was fully finalized. It states the 10x multiplier but also says the most you can sow in a field is 12 sacks instead fo the actual 30, and that the highest fertility is ideal rather than excellent.  Autumn arrives. We are now in the low-20s on happiness, the best we've seen so far, and the population is growing by around 20 people a season. A modest rate, but at least it's headed in the right direction. We're still losing a few people to other counties though and none coming in. Pro Tip - You can often 'borrow' labor from Serfs without losing a field to do something like maximize the harvest here, so long as you don't make a habit of it. It works basically the inverse of reclaiming, where you need a certain amount of shortfall before a field actually reverts.  For the first time, we actually don't want to buy from a trader now. Sorry Mr. Goldpenny. We have a credible cattle herd and can feed our population, so we're saving our crowns for other expenditures.  This is our first example of potentially useful Gossip though. There can also be info on the prosperity of a county or similar. If we had Full Visibility on we could just look ourselves; another reason why I like playing with Limited, as it makes this feature more interesting.  We're now seeing this Lion icon instead of our usual Sceptre in between turns more often. The paws and tail on the lion move, and you hear the sound of marching. It indicates the current player, the Knight in this case, is moving troops around and possibly fighting.  Winter, 1271; our first Immigration. We've hit 24 happiness now, so we'll want to keep it in the low-mid 20s and I'll raise taxes to do that. Why not higher? We don't want it to grow too fast, or we'll outgrow our food supply. Also, saving up crowns is important for early military actions. The purely economic phase will end when we reach at least one of two milestones: several hundred crowns saved up, and/or 500 population. Our latest planting is back up some to 18 sacks this year. We have exactly 200 Grain stored up, so we're starting to amass a sizable stockpile are much less at the whim of RNG on that side also.  The Steward has nothing but happy thoughts for us.  The game of thrones is afoot. The Earl has expanded from his starting county of Suffolk and added Cambridgeshire to his kingdom. The battle location is shown by the crossed swords. After a few seasons it will fade to a smaller icon, and after a few more disappear completely. Note carefully the color of the hilts on the sword, which identifies the combatants; white for the Earl, and and yellow represents any neutral county. We can't see armies or castles unless they are within our visibility, but battles, county ownership, and traders always are shown unless we've turned them off.  Another example of a positive weather event. We've made the rounds of most of the possible events at this point. I think there's a pretty good number of them; one positive about the game is there's a solid balance between having enough that they don't get super-repetitive but not so many that it becomes silly.  There's our population; we're getting a couple dozen in from Herefordshire every season and also solid natural growth. Also noteworthy; we're at Mixed Health which is the middle of the scale and better than we started out. Grain consumption is increasing as our Cattle herds can't keep up with the growth, but our harvests are more than adequate to make up the difference.  The Treasury is also happier, bringing in almost a hundred Crowns per season. Gloucestershire is no longer in crisis, and has become a rising economic power. We are now ready to 'invite', by force of arms, neighbors to join the Kingdom. There is an argument for waiting longer and fully strengthening the economy of Gloucestershire first. That can work, but it's slower.  There are two more County screens to look at; this is the Labor view. We're already familiar with the first four categories, and they can be assigned here although it works a lot better in practice IMO to use the Fields screen for that, and then come here to position the leftover idlers. - Builders construct Castles, which require Stone and Timber. - Miners mine for Iron. - Quarryers and Foresters acquire Stone and Timber respectively. - Armorers make weapons out of Iron. Builders, like the top four professions, always work at their standard rate. The last four are a little more complicated though. The progress bar on the right underneath Iron, Stone, Timber, and Weapon shows how much work has been done towards the next unit. This takes several hundred to over a thousand worker-seasons depending on which profession you are talking about. There's also efficiency to be concerned with; that's the 12% listed on the Miner line here. Efficiency improves every season that workers are active in a profession, and takes several seasons to max out. If you take everyone out for even one season, you are back to square one. Reducing the number of workers but keeping some there has a similar but lesser penalty. There's enforced long-term planning here; these industries can't just be ramped-up at the drop of a hat. In game terms, 1 ton of Iron is used for each Weapon, which is enough to outfit 50 soldiers. Unlike food and livestock, Stone/Timber/Iron/Weapons are global resources. They can be used by any county at any time without needing to be moved around. The same is true of Crowns.  Clicking on the red button next to Weapons brings up this. Always defaults to Swords unless you change it. Changing the weapon adjusts both Current and Future production; I think those are an artifact of a previous design or something as the Future one seems to serve no purpose. Also don't ask stupid questions like how one makes a Long bow out of Iron. Pro Tip - There are at least two major implications of these mechanics. One is that counties that do significant grain farming are not counties that can be effective industrially. They can't handle the labor swings. This is a major factor in encouraging specialization. Kingdoms with many counties will do better that way than by just making every county do the same thing. Second, building castles is sadly almost never worth doing. This is one of those areas where I think Lords of the Realm leaned too much into realism at the expense of gameplay. The intro was all about the castle, they are a huge cool thematic part of the medieval environment, and there's a whole castle design feature that we'll briefly get into later. Clearly they wanted castle-building to be a major part of the game. But it's just too expensive to be worthwhile. The group of castle designs that come stock with the game range from the Basic Keep on the low end (17 stone, 10 wood, 784 builder-seasons to construct) to the Caerphilly (43 stone, 28 wood, 2808 builder-seasons). The building amount is fine; getting that many resources is nuts though and takes at least an order of magnitude longer than the actual building process. You can always buy the stone and timber, and definitely should if you're going to put up a castle, but even so the materials for even a Basic Keep are going to run about 3500 Crowns to purchase. There are far better uses of your coin than that. As we'll see, attacking castles is completely trivial as well due to siege mechanics that weren't thought out very well. The whole castle feature from beginning to end really ends up falling flatter than a pancake. In my opinion it is hands down the worst part of Lords of the Realm.  Finally there is Military, accessed by the soldier image. Pro Tip: The text on the right is important; all armies eat the food supply of the county they are in. They also take priority over any peasants, who just get what is left over after the soldiers have taken what they need. Practically speaking, this means that counties that are on the border of a protracted conflict tend to suffer badly. It is also one reason why relying soley on Cattle is not a great idea; such counties can often have soldiers come in, eat a bunch of the Cattle if not all of them, leaving nothing for the group of peasants just trying to survive. In such situations I find shipping Grain in, which requires no labor or fields to maintain like the herds do, to be the most effective way of keeping the county viable. The rest of this screen is about raising armies. This is done in increments of 50. There is no information whatsoever, either in the game or the manual, on the strengths and weaknesses of the unit types. I think the player is intended to use their general historical knowledge here. Each unit is matched with one type of weapon required, with two exceptions: - Peasants require no weapon. They are literally just farmers grabbing their pitchforks and wearing no armor, having no training of any kind, just conscripted from their fields and marched off to a battle. They perform as you would expect in that circumstance. Even so, the expense of properly outfitting an army results in early battles and to an extent even battles later on being fought largely by peasants. - Knights require two weapons, Swords and Armor. As you might expect, man-for-man they are the most effective soldiers. They also are rare to see. Pro Tip: Conscripting a large number of your population causes a direct hit to happiness, determined by the % of your population that you are taking. Less than 10% is considered acceptable and results in no penalty. That's the significance of reaching 500 population; it means conscripting the minimum-size army of 50 is free from a happiness point of view. The penalty is applied per army, not per season, so you can conscript as many small armies as you have population over 500 to produce and effectively bypass the penalty entirely. Mercenaries are not currently available in this case, but occasionally will be. Roughly once a year on average there will be some in a county to hire, always one at a time. There is a fee for hiring them and they require greater pay each season that your own soldiers do. Pro Tip: Mercenaries are a fraction of the price of buying weapons and outfitting your soldiers that way. The best way to fight in the earlygame is to hire melee mercs as soon as possible. It would take many years of paying them for the price to equalize, and by that time they'll be dead in the service of your Kingdom, having taken a great many of your enemies with them.  Incrementing the number of peasants - or if we had weapons the others - updates how many men for the army and how much they'll have to be paid each season. Better soldiers demand higher wages of varying amounts. If you choose to Raise the army, you get this:  If they were mercenaries, this is where we'd be told how much their initial fee is. If you don't have enough to pay them, the game won't even let you increase their number initially. We're not here just to entertain ourselves: our first army, the worst possible at 50 Peasants but you have to start somewhere, is raised. Up Next: Joining the Fray Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 01:13 on May 10, 2023 |
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May 8, 2023 14:07
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Inefficient yes, but build your own pretty castle was very very appealing to me as a child.
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May 8, 2023 14:23
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AtomikKrab posted:Inefficient yes, but build your own pretty castle was very very appealing to me as a child. Yeah...
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May 8, 2023 16:05
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I remember castles being a decent investment in 2, but a good number of things obviously changed between games. Like they got rid of sheep; maybe too many players ignored them in favor of the free food from cows?
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May 8, 2023 16:16
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Felinoid posted:I remember castles being a decent investment in 2, but a good number of things obviously changed between games. Like they got rid of sheep; maybe too many players ignored them in favor of the free food from cows?
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May 8, 2023 16:30
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CptWedgie posted:To be fair, free food means more population to tax, which I'm pretty sure means more overall income. Plus the wool mechanic was a hassle; a resource that exists solely to produce a different resource once a year, which, in turn, only exists to be sold... yeah, I don't blame anyone for going the lazy "just get more people to tax" route one bit- less micromanagement that way. Yeah, I'm sure I'd do the same. Heck, took me ages to even bother with grain farming in 2. Just all cows all the time, which is good to a point but not optimal.
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May 8, 2023 16:33
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For now I'll just say that for multiple reasons, castles are *much* better in the second game than they are in this one. We'll unpack that later 
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May 8, 2023 17:07
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Felinoid posted:Yeah, I'm sure I'd do the same. Heck, took me ages to even bother with grain farming in 2. Just all cows all the time, which is good to a point but not optimal. That said, when the problem isn't on the player's side but rather due to an underperforming mechanic, the easiest (and sometimes even the best) solution is to just remove that mechanic entirely. Now granted, it's entirely possible I'm underestimating sheep due to never having played 1, but they really don't seem worth it at first glance.
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May 8, 2023 17:11
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AtomikKrab posted:Inefficient yes, but build your own pretty castle was very very appealing to me as a child. Wasn't there also a series just called something like "Castles!" that had pretty detailed castle building? I vaguely remember it. Also I think this is where child me got completely lost, I greatly expected I should just beeline for a military rather than building up my economic base first.
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May 8, 2023 18:43
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PurpleXVI posted:Wasn't there also a series just called something like "Castles!" that had pretty detailed castle building? I vaguely remember it. Yeah, I had Castles 2 as a kid and loved building a huge castle from scratch. I also enjoyed how immersive it felt, like you'd get asked real questions about theology and your answers would affect your relationship with the pope or something like that.
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May 8, 2023 18:48
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I'm curious what you can do with 50 peasants
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May 8, 2023 19:19
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Sherbert Hoover posted:Yeah, I had Castles 2 as a kid and loved building a huge castle from scratch. I also enjoyed how immersive it felt, like you'd get asked real questions about theology and your answers would affect your relationship with the pope or something like that. I played that as a kid on the school computers! I should go back to it. It was a fun game, but I was kind of bad at it.
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May 8, 2023 19:29
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Kanthulhu posted:I'm curious what you can do with 50 peasants Well, with some turnips, onions and carrots you can get a pretty OK stew going. Quite handy during those years where you only get heavy rains.
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May 8, 2023 21:18
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Kanthulhu posted:I'm curious what you can do with 50 peasants When you're the king, whatever you want, baby!
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May 8, 2023 22:36
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Kanthulhu posted:I'm curious what you can do with 50 peasants You can go scorched-earth with them, but not a whole lot else. If you get 50, and then another 50, and then another 50, and then ... etc., then eventually you have enough to do something more with though.
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May 9, 2023 02:52
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Strategic Sage posted:You're right, now that I think about it. If any mods are reading this, I'd like to have the word 'shot' changed to 'chopped' in the thread title. If not, I'll get around to pinging someone appropriate eventually. PurpleXVI posted:Wasn't there also a series just called something like "Castles!" that had pretty detailed castle building? I vaguely remember it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castles_II%3A_Siege_and_Conquest
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May 9, 2023 03:29
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we had both Lords 1 and 2 (and I probably own them both on GoG too because of course) when I was a kid but I could never figure out how to do anything in Lords 1. I loved reading manuals so you'd think I would've eaten it up but no, always played Lords 2. Then again, Lords 2 just had so much personality that I didn't mind Draaaaaaaaaaaw SWORDS
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May 9, 2023 10:16
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Aces High posted:Draaaaaaaaaaaw SWORDS sounds of massed bows intensify thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-
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May 9, 2023 21:47
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I've made a small edit to the last update to clarify something I said about conscripting armies and the happiness penalty:me posted:The penalty is applied per army, not per season, so you can conscript as many small armies as you have population over 500 to produce and effectively bypass the penalty entirely. The fact that it works this way allows for some rather extreme abuse. I will of course be proceeding with said abuse immediately 
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May 10, 2023 01:17
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Immediately invading and conquering all of your neighboring counties, then immediately disbanding the militias to avoid having to avoid feeding the commoners?
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May 10, 2023 03:58
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Invading a nearby county then torching it to the ground to deny your enemies it's use is also good.
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May 10, 2023 04:10
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Raising a mass of peasants and moving them to another county as a way of forcing population migration?
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May 10, 2023 05:06
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Scouting & Happiness Abuse: Autumn 1272-Summer 1273 After raising an army, they appear near the town cross in whatever county they were raised in. Clicking on them to bring up the details can be a bit finnicky, too high or too low and the game thinks you want the county not the army. Aiming for the head or torso works reliably though. The size of the army is indicated by the number of soldiers shown, which can be up to three. That is the only information we can get on opposing armies before actually fighting them, which makes for some tricky decisions on when to fight and when not to.  I like how each army has it's own name. They also have a home/origin county, i.e. 'Yeomen of Gloucestershire'. That means they can't be disbanded anywhere else. If you join two armies from different counties, the larger army is used for the home county. This can be abused to directly transfer population from one county to another, but it's not really worth doing. NewMars posted:Raising a mass of peasants and moving them to another county as a way of forcing population migration? So unfortunately not really due to the home county feature. Health is quite naturally derived from the health of the county they came from. There is zero documentation anywhere on how health or Morale changes exactly, but it appears to be impacted by what you'd expect: low morale can cause an army to disband after a defeat, successful battles are more beneficial than defeats, keeping the army in locations where they will have enough food is a good idea, and so on.  Splitting an army is done in 10-man increments; that's the lower limit on army size.  Disbanding requires a confirmation, and returns the soldiers to the main peasant population pool. If the army is large enough, it also increases happiness. Randalor posted:Immediately invading and conquering all of your neighboring counties, then immediately disbanding the militias to avoid having to avoid feeding the commone Welp if you disband them you do still have to feed them. There's no 'just go away and disappear' or mass execution or anything like that. Really for that you'd just want to randomly send them on a suicidal battle against the nearest enemy, but population is generally good to have, as long as you manage it properly.  Having split the army purely for demonstration purposes, we see that it puts the new army nearby. Exactly where is predictable, so in some situations you can use this to get a tile or two of 'free movement' towards your intended destination. To move around, we select the fourth button at the bottom of Kingdom Level, the one with a soldier and an arrow. That turns our cursor from a sceptre to this grey hand with pointy finger thing.  Moving around looks like this. The shortest path is determined automatically. An army can move 12 tiles per season if staying on the road.  This shows a couple of things; off-road movement is indicated by a red circle. Usually there's not a reason to do it, but here it's actually a little faster than following the road all the way around. Also, our movement actually extends three tiles past what we can see. I think this could have been resolved fairly easily by just having limited visiblity range extended to match the movement range of armies, but whatever. Just makes it a little funky and strange. This isn't a fog-of-war situation either; if you make a move like this and then come back, you'll 'forget' any locations of roads/forests/town cross/fields/etc. you discovered. Pro Tip - Armies can only make one move per season, regardless of how far it is compared to your move allowance. You can't go halfway and then re-assess the situation. Make sure you know where you're going and why before you commit to it. This can also be used against enemies to great effect.  Reinforcing that going off-road means going nowhere and getting their fast. Three tiles per season and that's it.  Finally, if moving to or even through something the army can interact with, an amber circle appears at that location. In this case we can combine armies, bringing up another simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down confirmation. Attacking enemies or destroying villages/crops displays the same. So that's how to move, but where do we want to move?  Gloucestershire is the most double-edged starting position on the map, and I would say overall the worst. We're at one of the major nexuses of roads in the Realm. Many neighbors means many choices for where to expand and more counties to potentially get immigrants from, but it also means we can be attacked by more enemies and from more direction than anywhere else - and that's worse. The Baron in the southwest is sort of on the other end of the spectrum. He has no choice but to expand straight towards us. I would love to be able to head straight for him, eliminate that front quickly while everyone else squabbles in the north and east. Unfortunately this is not really practical; we need to establish a stronger base before seriously trying to take out one of the other nobles, and in the meantime we're certain to be dealing with multiple fronts. For now, it's about the low-hanging fruit. We have road access to four neighbors, forming our pool of initial targets: - Gwent to the west - Herfordshire to the north is most likely at the moment since that's where most of our immigrants are currently coming from, which hopefully makes them easy pickings. - Oxfordshire to the east - Wiltshire to the south. Likely the opposite situation there as we were having emigration to them for a while so it's probably a high-population county. The strategic goal is to establish and defend a buffer of counties around Gloucestershire as quickly as possible, while continuing to boost our economy. So which direction do we go? Well, for now all of them; splitting our initial army into 10-peasant groups and scouting out the possibilities. Once we know more we can decide where to go in force first.  Herefordshire: we enter a neutral county for the first time. This is really a pointless message; we sure aren't going to be bribing them with this kind of money. There are no repercussions for not doing so. It's really in the 'We Protest!' - simply because they have to protest officially but know it won't do any good - sort of thing. The message itself changes, and gives you an indication of what the county thinks of itself. This one is pretty middle of the road; Herefordshire views themselves as inferior to Gloucestershire so it's not overly defiant, but at the same time just please go away. A few points to remember about neutral counties: - In extreme situations they will be glad to see you and 'pre-emptively surrender', giving you the county as soon as you enter and saying they'd love to have you as their sheriff. That only happens if they're in bad straits, but it's something we'll hopefully run into at least once. - Neutral counties never raise an army of any kind. They do defend their town cross if attacked, but only with peasants. The number of defenders depends on the population of the county. - Neutral counties tend to specialize in one economic focus; grain, cows, or sheep. They also tend to be managed quite badly, so they start off ok but as more time passes their situation worsens. You could argue that conquering them is an act of benevolence. My headcanon on this is that there isn't a local noble strong or respected enough to take charge. If there were, they'd be one of our rivals.  Wiltshire to the south. This is what they say when they're pretty confident in themselves and in no mood to put up with your interference; for a while we had people emigrating to Wiltshire so they're probably our most prosperous neighbor. With one 10-peasant 'army' headed in each of the four directions, that leaves a final 10 that are simply disbanded and returned to the population as useful labor.  It's harvest time. We also need to continue making progress on reclaiming fields and steadily expanding our planting volume each year. I can't afford to go crazy on building a military quite yet.  This one I would translate as 'we suck, but we're not going to be complete doormats'. It's more accomodating than the other two. Gwent gives us the same message that Herefordshire did. So in terms of ease of conquest, Oxfordshire - then Herefordshire/Gwent - then Wiltshire is our pecking order. Meanwhile another Plague strikes. Grrr. By robbing from Serfs temporarily I'm still able to plant 42 sacks, almost a field and a half.  This is why; population still growing in a plague is an impressive thing. We're now getting people in from multiple directions, more than enough to compensate.  Spring is our first good opportunity to get a read on the neutral counties. Gwent has at least two villages so a modest population probably. No apparent field activity but we can see just over half of them so they might have something going on that we're missing. The western half of the county has no road access so we'll have to venture into the wilderness a bit to be sure of what we're dealing with. The gap on the right side of the screen shows something I mentioned earlier; we'll want more scouting parties out eventually because as soon as something is out of range, it's as if you never saw it in the first place.  Herefordshire looks pretty good; two grain fields out of 11 visible. They've at least got some production going on.  Seeing an awful lot of nothing going on in Oxfordshire.  Yeck. Wiltshire is pretty much the worst kind of county to conquer. Five villages means there's a lot of people living here, but a small cattle operation isn't enough to feed that many. This place is going to crash hard, and has probably already started doing that. It's basically begging for war crimes to be committed. We'll get to that.  The next plan is to set in motion what I'm calling the Infinite Happiness Loop (IHL). To make this work we need greater than 600 population so we can raise at least two armies, and not-terrible happiness to start, since if it's too low the county will outright refuse to allow conscription.  Three armies have been raised because that's the most I can get while staying under 10% for each one.  After combining them into one army, I now disband them. The point is that we get the happiness benefit of disbanding an army larger than 10% and returning that population to the labor force, but don't actually pay the penalty for raising those armies in the first place since that was done piecemeal.  Afterwards we are at 26 Happiness instead of 21, with the exact same situation otherwhise as before the process started. Repeat this a couple times, and we're maxed out at 40. One final piece which only is feasible if all of your counties are developed well enough to use the IHL; jacking up taxes to the maximum of 50. This carries a massive happiness penalty to 10 per turn, but since we can just get that back at no cost, we can have populations which are simultaneously obscenely oppressed while also being completely thrilled about it, to the point where neighbor counties are beating down our county door to get in on said confiscation. Aren't loopholes grand?  Isn't the Earl just special. These announcements come with an animation of the drawbridge lowering ...  ... revealing a figure inside apparently directing the operation.  Here's our results, not counting the 300+ Crowns we brought in for one season and that's just the beginning. Calling this highway robbery would be an insult. Up Next: Actual Fighting Begins Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 13:51 on May 10, 2023 |
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May 10, 2023 13:44
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Aces High posted:Lords 2 just had so much personality that I didn't mind This is how I feel about it. Very good strategy game, but it's the experience/atmosphere that make it great. Hence all the catchphrases popping up in this thread being 100% from that game and none from Lords 1 or Lords 3. MagusofStars posted:FYI, this came up in the Sandcastle thread a few months ago and the general consensus was that if you need to change your title, the easiest way is to just click report on your own first post of the thread and put the reason as the name you want the title changed to. Thanks, I'll do that. Fun fact; I actually found a video with a recording of it and it does say 'shot', not 'chopped', so I was actually remembering correctly on that. But it's 'We'll Be Shot to Pieces' not 'We'll Get Shot to Pieces'. Not particularly important but you know details and respecting the source material and just because I'm picky etc. Gnoman posted:Title should have been "You are ugly, and your mother dresses you funny." I can see that, but I always identified more with the things the soldiers said; the rival nobles were interesting but felt less central to me. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 13:54 on May 10, 2023 |
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May 10, 2023 13:48
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Strategic Sage posted:The next plan is to set in motion what I'm calling the Infinite Happiness Loop (IHL). To make this work we need greater than 600 population so we can raise at least two armies, and not-terrible happiness to start, since if it's too low the county will outright refuse to allow conscription. Hoo boy. I'd been wondering why you didn't dump taxes to jack happiness up (I always do that in Lords 2 until happiness is >90%, at which point you've got immigrants aplenty, and thus a higher pop to tax), and I guess now I have my answer. Combined with the early food crisis, I guess. Eager to see if this works in Lords 2, though I probably still wouldn't use it.
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May 10, 2023 14:39
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I love the Infinite Happiness Loop, that's some goofy, 'sploity stuff.
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May 10, 2023 14:42
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Felinoid posted:I'd been wondering why you didn't dump taxes to jack happiness up (I always do that in Lords 2 until happiness is >90%, at which point you've got immigrants aplenty, and thus a higher pop to tax), and I guess now I have my answer. Combined with the early food crisis, I guess. It was mainly due to the food crisis actually. I didn't want more immigrants until I could actually feed them. I probably could have gotten away with doing that a little more though once we got cattle up.
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May 10, 2023 14:52
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