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Oh man I never figured out that exploit as a kid, waiting to see what you do with all that INFINITE MONEY
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May 10, 2023 15:08
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quote:
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May 10, 2023 16:46
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Strategic Sage posted:
 Glamis Castle is in Scotland...
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May 10, 2023 17:22
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Black Robe posted:
it's also alleged to be haunted as poo poo and a hotbed of occult doings, iirc maybe they're celebrating being well out of the way of these mystical shenanigans
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May 10, 2023 19:36
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So I have a question about the difficulty settings in this game, I assume they only affect the player and not any of the AI's?
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May 10, 2023 20:07
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Black Robe posted:
I mean it never said it was his castle, maybe he just got invited up for the grand opening by the Scots. 
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May 10, 2023 20:36
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Koorisch posted:So I have a question about the difficulty settings in this game, I assume they only affect the player and not any of the AI's? The way I understand it, economic affects the player's starting situation only. Warfare though I think affects the AI not the player; they make more castles and larger armies and things of that nature. Black Robe posted:
Something something Mandela Effect? I mean if we can have a fictional but plausible war, surely we can move a castle as well  .
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May 11, 2023 02:42
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God I dumped so many hours into this game and its sequal.
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May 12, 2023 19:28
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Strategic Sage posted:Something something Mandela Effect? I mean if we can have a fictional but plausible war, surely we can move a castle as well Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if a Brit from those days named their castle something that was already the name of another (Scottish) castle and just pretended they'd thought of it first. "Stolen valor" is very far from a new thing.
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May 12, 2023 20:48
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There's stuff like Camelot Castle so it's just probably taking it from a list of names.
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May 12, 2023 22:25
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Amazing games these (well, the first two anyway - never played the 3rd). I had the demo of the first game, which was time-limited and prevented you from building castles (not really that big of a deal, as the OP explained), but I still played it to death anyway. I actually prefer it to the second game because I didn't play the sequel until quite some years later when I was well into my 20s (around 2007 or so), and so while it is superior to the first game in most respects, the original has more nostalgic charm for me as a game from my childhood. One thing that was absolutely far better in the sequel was the music. The composer, Keith Zizza, has a Youtube channel where he's uploaded a bunch of his work, including high-quality versions of the LOTR2 music and some cool new pieces heavily inspired by them, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwwZ9CtOjDM Worth checking out!
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May 13, 2023 09:29
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So does anyone actually know the amount of workers/resource/season ratio for each of the resources? I put about 500 or so into mining iron but since I don't know if there's a limit on how many that can actually mine, should I be splitting my county to do both mining and smithing at the same time or just go all in on one resource?
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May 13, 2023 21:48
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In Lords 2 I usually had weapon production and resource mining in the same counties, so that I didn't get too unbalanced (like if your mining town is too busy with a plague or something to mine much, so your arsenal town has to sit on their hands for lack of material), but I have no idea if there's some optimization trick about it.
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May 13, 2023 22:07
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Yes, but it doesn't really matter much. Assuming you aren't going for castle-building all you're talking about is mining iron and turning it into weapons with armorers. Since iron has to be 'ahead' - i.e. you can't use iron that is being mined, only what you already have on hand - and the available population is always going to vary to some degree, it's really just a case of balancing out how much mining and how much armoring you have going on.
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May 15, 2023 14:16
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Crap this game takes me back, it literally taught me about crop rotation.
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May 16, 2023 11:38
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Never played the first game but played the hell out of the second, the secret song plays rent-free in my head.
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May 16, 2023 14:29
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Robindaybird posted:Never played the first game but played the hell out of the second, the secret song plays rent-free in my head. Neither me nor my brother ever played the game, but we found the .wav in some folder or other, and we've been quoting it at each other for the past 25 years.
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May 16, 2023 15:01
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Just a quick update; we've basically reached the critical point and I'm actually rather impressed by how bad the luck is for this situation. It might actually be unwinnable or at least borderline so using 'normal' tactics, which I don't think I've seen before in this game. It's basically just about avoiding being in a situation where we can avoid having to constantly fight off larger armies than we can handle on multiple fronts at once, and the RNG is being particularly uncooperative so I'm trying to find a way out of the mess. It might require massive cheese, which ... if so I guess that's what I'll do. It would be rather hilarious if trying to break the game ended up breaking me and I had to re-start, but I'm still looking for a way to make it work. That's why it's been a lengthy pause here in-between updates. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 11:31 on May 17, 2023 |
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May 17, 2023 11:24
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... you're just going to tease us with this and not show us the death spiral? You're a mean one, Sage.
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May 17, 2023 12:11
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Part of any Impressions game is losing due to overly complicated mechanics and poorly thought-out systems.
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May 17, 2023 12:46
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Like yeah show us the bad rng
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May 17, 2023 14:40
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It's not like you didn't cheese the game already.
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May 17, 2023 15:17
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Honestly that starting spot is probably one of the worst ones to get since you'll get attacked from all directions unless you take out the AI to the NW and SW ASAP.
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May 17, 2023 21:22
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I found this info in a GoG thread and I'm hoping it will prove useful for anyone else here playing LotR1: "Here's some industry related statistics: Miners start at 12% efficiency, and increase by 12% each season, thus they need 9 seasons to reach 100% efficiency. A unit of iron takes 1000 worker-seasons (worker x season x efficiency) to mine. Quarryers start at 15% efficiency, and increase by 15% each season, thus they need 7 seasons to reach 100% efficiency. A unit of stone takes 750 worker-seasons (worker x season x efficiency) to mine. Foresters start at 18% efficiency, and increase by 18% each season, thus they need 6 seasons to reach 100% efficiency. A unit of wood takes 500 worker-seasons (worker x season x efficiency) to cut. Armorers start at 9% efficiency, and increase by 9% each season, thus they need 12 seasons to reach 100% efficiency. A unit of armor/weapon takes 1250 worker-seasons (worker x season x efficiency) to smith. If you put 250 workers in each industry from initial efficiency: Iron: first unit after 8 seasons, thereafter a unit every 4 seasons. Stone: first unit after 6 seasons, thereafter a unit every 3 seasons. Wood: first unit after 5 seasons, thereafter a unit every 2 seasons. Weapon/Armor: first unit after 10 seasons, thereafter a unit every 5 seasons. "
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May 17, 2023 22:47
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Randalor posted:... you're just going to tease us with this and not show us the death spiral? You're a mean one, Sage. Atomik Krab posted:Like yeah show us the bad rng I don't really get this, but I guess I shouldn't have posted at all? I'm not a fan of showing things out of continuity in an LP, or a 'branching path' or whatever, it seems like a lot more effort than it's worth. The point of the post was just 'this is why there hasn't been another update yet', it wasn't meant as a tease and I don't think it was one. I don't think the death spiral is that interesting; basically A) It's fairly random whether you can get peace with other nobles via alliances, B) continued bad luck with getting decent mercs or even any at all, and C) not being able to survive that due to having the worst starting location. The Maximum Cheese method is proving stupidly effective, and I probably should have swallowed my preconceptions of sensible gameplay and gone with that initially. It'll just take some time esp. with actual real-life work going crazy for me to put it together.
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May 18, 2023 12:59
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Can you at least summarize what happened and what you tried and failed before resorting to cheese at the start of the next update? I'm always curious to see someone much more knowledgeable than me explain why "solutions" either failed or caused the spiral to intensify, especially when it comes to older games like this when actual game information was scattered across the wild west of early-mid 90's internet (if at all).
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May 18, 2023 13:37
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Considering what 1 is vice LotR2, I wouldnt worry so much about how successful one is at the first game
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May 18, 2023 20:09
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Honestly a game like this the death spirals aren't even that interesting, just frustrating, though it'd be good to see some reasons why some spirals happen and how much of it could be avoided and how much it's "RNG gently caress you"
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May 18, 2023 22:08
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Robindaybird posted:Honestly a game like this the death spirals aren't even that interesting, just frustrating, though it'd be good to see some reasons why some spirals happen and how much of it could be avoided and how much it's "RNG gently caress you" Pretty much this, it's very easy to mess your counties up if you go *too* fast, If you're doing the happiness exploit you really want to wait a little bit to get a nice amount of cash so you can buy your new (and probably broke) county out of starvation so it doesn't instantly revolt or the populace becomes so small it takes a long time to get it up to something useful.
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May 19, 2023 00:51
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Randalor posted:Can you at least summarize what happened and what you tried and failed before resorting to cheese at the start of the next update? I thought about this and ... not really. It would require me to explain things about diplomacy and combat before I've had a chance to show them, which would sort of be putting the cart before the horse.
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May 20, 2023 13:29
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Oh my lord (of the realms), I loved those games! I had this special German edition of Lords of the Realms I+II which included additional maps and playing the map of Prussia and the Kaiser-games were my first real venture into strategy games. I played both games for months (until I had to give the LotR-games back because said special edition belonged to our local library) back when I was a teenager. Edit: poo poo, Kaiser 2 is available on Androi? Welp, time to get my tablet ready.
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May 21, 2023 00:39
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The Art of Being a Nuisance: Summer 1273 - Winter 1273 Thanks for being patient everyone! Time to get going again.  It's the summer of 1273, and Gloucestershire has just over half the fields usable now. Population is a hair under 900. We need just a sliver of labor this season to get a field reclaimed, so almost half of the people are free to do ... something else. That's one factor making this is the critical moment of the game. Others are that the neutral counties are starting to malfunction, and the other nobles are starting to expand. Our options are basically to expand in some way to traditionally try to match them - more on that and how it ultimately failed in this particularly circumstance later - or to go Maximum Cheese, implementing what you might call the Fabian Strategy on drugs. Rather than trying to fight the other nobles directly, we'll simply attack them economically and destroy their ability to wage war. Abuse of their decision-making, deployments, and combat mechanics will most definitely be involved. This is stupidly effective, but not particularly fun and certainly not the intended path of the struggle. So let's have at it!  We have a four small scouting groups out as you may recall; each of them begins to march towards enemy territory.  Another 100 Peasants are conscripted, one 50-man army at a time to stay under the 10% threshold. These are split into 10-Peasant groups and spread as evenly as we can throughout appropriate roads heading towards the nobles. I'll be doing this a lot, and we'll shortly see the reasons why. The only reason I'm not sending out more peasants is that we also want to increase population, continue reclaiming fields and expanding our agriculture, and generally grow Gloucestershire economically. I'm basically splitting the difference to both increase our population and send out these 'mini-armies' at the same time.  We'll be looking at the Realm Map quite a bit as we do this to get an overview. The black marks are of course our peasant bands - it's really quite a stretch to call them armies - beginning to fan out.  Meanwhile we'll do some pointless diplomacy just to see how it works. Probably because they didn't have anywhere else to put it, we unintuitively head to the Treasury screen for this. We're looking for Dispatch Message. This can be done once per season.  Here we can see any current Alliances, which are really just 'we'll not fight for the time being' agreements and can be broken for any reason or no reason at all. We can also propose new ones, or try to influence the other nobles opinon of us by sending other types of messages:  These are somewhat amusing, and you can change the default language what's written to whatever you want. No matter what you type there, a taunt will always be a taunt. You could say 'Your Most Excellent and Regal Majesty, you are the greatest ruler in all of history', but it would still be taken negatively if the message style is negative. For solo play, there's really no reason to change what it says other than for your own entertainment.   'tyrannically iron-fisted' is a compliment. Just ponder that a moment. Those are the four options; Alliance, Taunting, Threatening, and Flattering. It couldn't be more irrelevant to the way we're going to approach this run, but we'll send out some messages to see how they respond. There is a random element to how they respond; sometimes they will approach you with an Alliance offer that doesn't seem to make much sense as well. Getting peace with one or multiple nobles can be crucial to this kind of situation where you just want to buy time, but nothing I did was able to make it work consistently. In general there just really isn't much substance to the diplomatic system; you either get lucky enough to benefit from it for a while, or you don't, and in most runs it just really doesn't matter. For our first round we propose an Alliance with the Baron.  Surplus peasants mine iron for now. They won't get far, but might as well since it's marginallly better than having them do nothing.  Any direct message from rival nobles, as opposed to the generic end-of-year blurbs, will be preceded by this announcement.  If the Baron agrees, he'll say 'At last you recognize my right to rule', blah blah blah.  The existing peasant groups move further out in various directions without incident in harvest season. No more are formed, as we have enough labor to gather in the grain and some extra to work on the fields, but not enough to reclaim another one. We also send out a Taunt to the Knight; whenever any message is dispatched, there is the sound of rapid hoofbeats disappearing into the distance as the rider gallops away.  The Knight is my favorite noble to mock. Probably because he makes it so easy to do. He's a predictably immature hot-head, and not the sharpest knife in the drawer.  Winter has come, and we need to keep our troops moving.  Just doing the happiness routine here, but this is what a medium-sized army looks like. 400 or more soldiers are required to get the second figure. We're up to 1200 population, so another 100 peasants get the treatment.  Gwent is our neighbor to the northwest. This useful tidbit tells us we've slightly surpassed them, and also gives us an indication of how large of an army we'd likely need to conquer them. We're sitting at about 1600 Crowns, which is plenty to purchase any mercenaries that might become available, but I'm not really comfortable buying anything at the moment.  Cattle aren't quite as spread out here, but I judged it more worthwhile to add a third grain field. Three is likely where I'll stay. Next year we'll aim for a full 90 sacks planting, but the 78 here is still a big jump from what we did last year. The Bishop will get an official Threat this time. We don't have time to get a verbal response from him before ...  Battle Demo (1:09)  The Bishop is the first noble whose territory we actually crossed into, prompting this attack. Hitting the thumbs-down here is your basic auto-resolve feature. We will definitely get to that, but first up let's see how the battle plays out if we take part.  All 'field battles' - that is, those that are not sieges - take place in this type of view. Most of it is just the terrain and soldiers. On the left, we have the unit scale of 10 men, which varies based on the size of the armies involved; who is fighting and how many soldiers they have; and then a series of 8 buttons. There is a dedicated supplemental instruction booklet, the Castle Siege &Battle Manual, and it refers to each of these by two different names because of course it does. The first describes what it does, the second what the image looks like. - Change Formation or Rank/Column - Top left, makes a unit face horizontally or vertically. - Start/Stop Battle or Hourglass - Top right. There is no speed setting, but this starts and stops time in the battle. Nothing will happen until you click it. - Move Units or Move Army - Next row down. Does what you'd expect. - Target Missiles or Archer - Only used for ranged units, to specify what to shoot at. Melee units, which is most of them, simply start fighting when they run into an an enemy. Ranged units fight hand-to-hand as well ... badly ... so to prevent that you want to keep them some distance away from enemy units. - Overview Map or Battlefield - Toggles a zoomed-out view that we will see shortly on and off. - Unit Information or Face - This one has multiple different modes showing different unit information. The options are nothing, a two-letter abbreviation showing what kind of unit it is, morale, and number of soldiers. - Retreat or Soldier with Flag - Offer Quarter or Hands with Flag - Allow the enemy to retreat with no further risk of casualties to your army. There ... really isn't a huge amount to say about the rest of the screen other than looking at your units. Terrain variety is barely a thing. It's just open fields and the rocks, light/dark patches, and so forth are entirely cosmetic. The only exception to this are swamps, which both slow down movement, and quoting the entirety of the manual's commentary on this, 'hamper their fighting ability'. Hamper in what way? No idea. It also claims that stats on the specific unit type are on the Quick Reference Card. They are not. Ahh, the glorious days of yore when it wasn't just about reading a physical manual, but deciphering what in the manual was true, and what was not.  This is the Overview Map view, in which we view the armies not as pixellated figures, but as groups of small circles, and can see the whole battlefield at once. That yellowish circle in the upper left I don't know about, I assume it's some artifact of the way Lords does battles; there's actually nothing there. There's also a thing that happens in a minority of battles where the enemy will have a soldier or two just spontaneously combust or something - i.e. they die shortly after the battle starts for unknown reasons. In this particular battle there are no swamps to point out. We'll come back to them in the future hopefully. Perhaps.  This is what the unit abbreviation looks like Pe = Peasant, Sp = Spearman, Sw = Swordsman, and so on.  Morale is represented by the hearts and is very important; in fact it is arguably the most important thing. Being flanked, taking losses, and things of that nature reduce morale. If it reaches 0, units start routing and fleeing and refusing to fight. We have 15 Morale here, and so are at a disadvantage. Pro Tip - The importance of morale means you can't just throw out masses of peasants as cannon fodder and overwhelm a smaller force of well-equipped soldiers past a certain point. The battle will just tip at a certain stage, esp. on Expert Warfare which it appears gives larger morale hits, and your army will rout en masse.  Clicking on a unit selects them for the purpose of giving orders. If you notice how the Bishop's army was divided into two groups - each of those group is one unit and will move and fight together. Multiple units can be selected at once to be given the same order. If you try to give an order without selecting a unit first, the game will yell at you with a musical sound effect and a pop-up. This quickly gets annoying, esp. since units are automatically de-selected after you've told them to do something.  Selecting Move Units turns the cursor to this dagger/sword, which is asking for a location. We'll move towards the Bishop's army, which is all peasants not that it matters given how out-numbered we are. It typically takes a couple-few seconds for them to respond. Orders can be given while paused, for those who are as APM-challenged as yours truly or moreso. Then the soldiers will march off, with the sound of footsteps accompanying them.  Get close enough, and they begin to engage with their mighty pitchforks. Once engaged, it is very hard to extract units from combat. There's something about fighting to the death that occupies their full attention. Go figure. The clash of weapons and occasional death cries can be heard. Even though we're only fighting half the Bishop's army here, it is of absolutely no surprise that we lose very quickly:  You don't say.  We didn't inflict a single casualty. At first glance, this seems pointless but it's really not. Since an army can only take one action per season, we just used up that action for these 354 enemy soldiers. We can stack peasant groups on the roads to make it difficult for other nobles to travel freely, and if they are fighting us or going around us, they aren't expanding into neutral counties and growing more powerful. But it gets better. Once we get enough peasants out there, we can do more than harass and delay, but start implementing actual scorched-earth tactics going after crops, livestock, and villages. But even before that, we're not actually going to fight these battles out at the moment.  Before we get to that, we'll note that Lords of the Realm is a game that likes to tell you the result of a battle ... and then tell you again ... and then tell you again. This will happen on both ends of the stick. The Power of Autoresolve Compels Us. Going back to the start of the battle, and choosing that option:  Umm, what? 10 peasants take down 67? This is deeply and profoundly stupid, and of course we're going to take advantage of it. And there is some logic here. It's not uncommon in strategic games for auto-resolve to be worse for the stronger side, in some cases even intentionally, to encourage the player to actually participate in playing out the battles, considering their tactics, etc. There will come a time when we want to do that. But for now, if we can just throw these piddling bands at the enemy, harass them, and also get a fantastic exchange rate from them swatting us aside ... that's a win-win!  Here's what the Bishop has to say about our threat. I am unimpressed by his piety which I have not seen, or his rhetoric which I have.
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May 21, 2023 18:39
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Holy poo poo that has to be one of the worst autoresolves I've ever seen.
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May 21, 2023 19:07
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PurpleXVI posted:Holy poo poo that has to be one of the worst autoresolves I've ever seen. Like, there comes a point where it should just go "you're so outnumbered you die before even getting to attack," and this has clearly exceeded it, yet somehow the minimum deployable troops managed to wipe out like 20% of a 350-man army. This is stupid and makes you wonder why anyone bothers to deploy actual armies instead of D&D adventuring parties. Seriously, did the ones who weren't dogpiling those hapless scrubs decide to pass the time by stabbing each other?!
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May 21, 2023 19:37
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Does the church even factor in this game, or it's just flavour for the bishop?
Gun Jam fucked around with this message at 19:45 on May 21, 2023 |
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May 21, 2023 19:40
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CptWedgie posted:Absurdly broken, absurdly cheese-able, and overall makes you wonder if the devs were even thinking when they programmed this crap. I'm imagining them following the ten peasants lemming-like off a cliff.
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May 21, 2023 20:03
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PurpleXVI posted:I'm imagining them following the ten peasants lemming-like off a cliff. They are all colorblind and got confused on to who exactly they should get to stabbing.
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May 21, 2023 20:21
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CptWedgie posted:This is stupid and makes you wonder why anyone bothers to deploy actual armies instead of D&D adventuring parties. It's sort of in that category of 'how many players would even bother trying it' I think is the main reason. Gun Jam posted:Does the church even factor in this game, or it's just flavour for the bishop? Just flavor. You have to take his word for it that he's not just a rank heretic or cultist or whatever that the established church is ashamed of.
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May 22, 2023 00:09
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PurpleXVI posted:I'm imagining them following the ten peasants lemming-like off a cliff. Imagine ten peasants at the edge of a cliff...
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May 22, 2023 00:40
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| # ? May 9, 2024 05:48 |
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Considering how old this game is, I am not surprised by the auto resolve doing wonky things like that. I have to imagine in modern games like this that as soon as you unpause, your troops will immediately flee the field
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May 22, 2023 03:15
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