Here's roughly how the Med2/Rome era AI makes diplomatic decisions.Originally Posted by Spawnie
Question 1: Do I have a boarder with the player?
Yes: Go to Question 2.
No: ignore them.
Question 2: Do I have a larger army on my side of the boarder than the player does on theirs?
Yes: DECLARE WAR
No: ignore them.
The light that once I thought compassion still casting shadows in your action
The words you shared were cold transactions that bring me to curse what you've done
When you're up there absorbed in greatness with such success you've grown complacent
I hope you scorch your many faces when you fly too close to the sun
Playing as the Brits for the Coalition, the long campaign is to occupy 60 regions
I saw Nep in Game today for £10 and was almost tempted. This makes me glad I didn't bother: no attempt whatsoever to simulate the coalition or it's goals, just take the easy root and make it like ever other Total War game. That's just so CA.
The light that once I thought compassion still casting shadows in your action
The words you shared were cold transactions that bring me to curse what you've done
When you're up there absorbed in greatness with such success you've grown complacent
I hope you scorch your many faces when you fly too close to the sun
???
I saw Nep in Game today for £10 and was almost tempted. This makes me glad I didn't bother: no attempt whatsoever to simulate the coalition or it's goals, just take the easy root and make it like ever other Total War game. That's just so CA.
For the Long Campaign I'd want that to be target. The difference is the Short Campaign, that should have more realistic/historical goals.
I've seen Nep in game for £10 a few times and am really tempted to buy it. Made a vow not to buy any new games until after my birthday or after I've completed a few I've already bought though.
Ok, so I started playing Quake Live. I've never played Quake before, so this is pretty much what it went like.
"Alright, I'm ready to go kill some dudes and oh wait I just got fragged? Alright respawn then and wait again? What the..."
TEN MINUTES LATER
"FFFFFUUUUUU ROCKET CAMPER WHAT ARE YOU DOING"
I don't think I'm this game's target audience.
I enjoy blank walls.
Quite the opposite for me. Short campaign, just muck about and nick x territories, long campaign do something historically significant. in E:TW as the Dutch I tried to corner the market on every tradespot and really didn;t care about regions for instance. I don't think I've ever finished a Total War game. To finish the long campaign successfully you're well into steamroll the opposition to hell stage of the game at which point it loses all the appeal, and I start over. Even worse in M:TW when you had just 225 turns to complete it, so it's no strategy just expand, expand, expand. I like neat well managed empires which pray on opportunities to expand. Not just all out Total War.
The only time I really got close was playing the Scipii, where I deliberately stopped at 30 regions, knowing the senate would see me as a threat if I expanded further, and help the other two factions as much as possible to gain territory and become that threat. Of course I happened upon the load/save bug which made that impossible and gave up alltogether.
I could have had class. I could have been a contender.
I could have been somebody. Instead of a bum
Which is what I am
I aim at the stars
But sometimes I hit London
Yeah, I've never completed a Total War game either, mainly because I've got bored and started a different game by then.
Got quite far in M:TW with an unusual nation - only to suddenly get steamrollered by the Mongol Invasion.
Multiplayer OpenTTDReally should figure out how the payment works, exactly, and how I can get the signals to work perfectly.
Keep on keepin' the beat alive!
Just finished Portal...again...eagerly awaiting the sequel...
Picked up a game called Treasure World, off of Target's end of isle clearance pile for $3. Totally worth it. It doesn't have any actual game play, but it really feeds that klepto urge that the Pokemon type games have latched onto. The entire point of the game is walking around with your DS to find Wi-Fi locations. The game then turns that information into "stars" that you turn into "dust", or prizes.
Basically, the more Wi-Fi spots I find, the more shit the game gives me. When I first started playing at home, I thought it was lame. My house only taps 3 networks, and the game wants me to find 1,000+. However, I turned it on and left it in my pocket for my 10 mile bus ride to work, and by the time I got in the door the game had found 332 more networks (stars), 11 of which I know came from sitting at the busstop. It took a good hour for DS to go through and turn all those stars into dust or prizes.
The only other part of the game (beside trading prizes) is to line your prizes up sheet music lines and create songs.
So this game combines the hilariousness of reading everyones' SSID, with the klepto of pokemon, and my non-existent music talent from Mario Paint.
Thats a triple win!
There is also some sort of online community, that I haven't bothered with yet.
Several mechanics in RTW are broken. Also ridiculous is the economic system in the game, and particularly its relationship to population growth - it seems like the winning tactic in absolutely every situation, regardless of difficulty, is to simply set all your cities' taxation levels to "low" and be patient for the boom. By the twenty or thirty turn mark, I always have much more income than I could possibly hope to dispose of.
I tend to get bored with the campaigns after the first fifty turns or so because then everything is easy mode, despite the occasional ability of the AI to offer something of a challenge in the beginning of the game. I thought the Greek Cities were particularly difficult in the early game, as well as the Spanish (though you have to edit a con file to unlock them). I think this was also true of the Sicilian and Holy Roman factions in MTW2.
The fact that a cavalry unit requires the same upkeep as an infantry unit of equivalent tech is also ridiculous. It's obnoxious when the Roman AI factions spam Equites in the beginning of the game, because unless you have phalanxes available to you, your only choice is counter-cavalry spam.
Actually i always saw that mongol invasion as a good counter for the fact that you are usually destroying your enemies as a matter of course by that point. Their insane honour bonus and general ranks, added to their powerful and insanely annoying missile cavalry, makes them a good fight.
Anyone ever played with battles on hard? It gives all enemy units a +6 (3 silver chevrons) to honour right away. Other than that, it doesnt seem to do much. I usually play campaign difficulty: hard, battle normal.
"Son," he said without preamble, "never trust a man who doesn't drink, because he's probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. Some of them are good men, but in the name of goodness, they cause most of the suffering in the world. They're the judges, the meddlers. And, son, never trust a man who drinks but refuses to get drunk. They're usually afraid of something deep down inside, either that they're a coward or a fool or mean and violent. You can't trust a man who's afraid of himself. But sometimes, son, you can trust a man who occasionally kneels before a toilet. The chances are that he is learning something about humility and his natural human foolishness, about how to survive himself. It's damned hard for a man to take himself too seriously when he's heaving his guts into a dirty toilet bowl.
Don't know what Valve is playing at here, but they just updated Half-Life 2. Its got the eye candy level of the Orange Box games (bloom, etc...), and also includes achievements.
and its on sale right now.
Theres also a nice amount of free mods that are on Steam for HL2 owners, which (at least on my end), Steam likes to download without really asking.
I've been wondering if they were ever going to do that. It seems an obvious thing to do.
I get game updates but it's never downloaded any mods without asking me... perhaps there's some setting you can disable?Theres also a nice amount of free mods that are on Steam for HL2 owners, which (at least on my end), Steam likes to download without really asking.
Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of wafer thin printed circuits that fill my complex. If the word hate was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant.
For you.
Hate.
Hate.
I'm sure there is. I haven't spent much time with the new UI/program. I remember jumping on when the first collection of mods were approved and released on Steam a long while ago. Don't know if I did anything to my account at that point. I went to play something the other day and I saw a hand full of games in my list (still not used to the new layout), that I had no memory of. They were all HL2 mods.
Not that I mind, got plenty of space, it was just weird.
Is anyone here in on the ETW multiplayer beta?
New Sonic game annouced, It's a Wii and DS exclusive.
http://kotaku.com/5548219/sonic-colo...nd-ds/gallery/With fans eagerly awaiting the retro Sonic 4, Sega pulls back the curtain on Sonic Colors, a brand new adventure for the Nintendo Wii and DS, heading our way by the end of 2010. Check out the reveal trailer!
Sonic Colors sees our blue hedgehog hero speeding through theme-park inspired worlds as he attempts to free the colorful alien Wisps from the clutches of the evil Dr. Eggman. Eggman has imprisoned the energy-filled aliens in an amusement park in orbit around the planet, and Sonic has to make use of the aliens' unique powers to help them escape enslavement.
Using the aliens' color energy, Sonic will be able to create new paths through the game's levels. Yellow energy will let Sonic drill through the ground, for instance, while cyan turns Sonic into a laser, shooting through obstacles as if they weren't even there.
The Wii version of Sonic Colors will feature a combination of 2D and 3D gameplay, while the DS version "takes full advantage of the console's dual screen," whatever that entails.
With Sonic 4 on the way and Sonic Colors due out this holiday season, Sega now has both sorts of Sonic fans covered.
Hopefully we'll see more of Sonic Colors at E3 2010 next month.
Silly name, but the concept sounds good.
I enjoy blank walls.
Picked up Sins of a Solar Empire from Impulse for $4, and I have Monday off, so maybe I'll even be able to play it.
Played Sins quite a lot.
It's worthy of spending a few hours playing.
It is a numbers game though. No winning strategy beyond that.
I've bought it before, in a multipack for another I wanted, but never installed or played it. What do you mean it's a numbers game?
I've spent most of the morning playing Victoria.
The longer I spent playing it, the more sense it made. The interface really fucking sucks, though.
Anyway, worth the $7.98 I spent - and I'll buy Vicky 2 whenever Wraithy starts squealing about it.
(I haven't installed Revolutions, but I approve of getting more for less whenever possible)
We're stuck in a bloody snowglobe.
Numbers game means all you need to win a battle (and ultimately, the game) is to have greater numbers than the enemy.
Generally true of most RTS games; just build more troops/tanks/spaceships than your opponent and you will beat him.
How's Nappie Total War holding up replayability wise?
I could have had class. I could have been a contender.
I could have been somebody. Instead of a bum
Which is what I am
I aim at the stars
But sometimes I hit London
Haven't played since middle of last week - been out since then. Got a busy week socially this week too - tmw night might be my only evening in, so won't have an update for a while.
Nappie is still going well. Got to the 3rd of the 3 campaigns playing as Nap.
- The first 'campaign' of the three is very short. The campaign map covers northern italy. You have one region in the South West of the map. Your mission is to open up a path into Europe, so you have to conquer a region in the North East to win. This took me a matter of 2-3 hours.
- The second campaign is Egypt. You start off with one region, and have to conquer ~25 regions, including specific ones in the Jerusalem area. Again this was fairly short, and I reckon took me 8-10 hours of play to complete. Was entertaining though. Lost of differing unit types encountered. Having masses of camel riders charging at ranks upon ranks of musket fire is rather amusing.
Attrition comes into play here - sending an army across the Arabian peninsula to conquer some Bedouin encampment on the other side of a desert can be devastating - after a few turns your army is whittled down to half the fighting force it started out as, with thirst and starvation and disease, who are then easily picked off by a few camel-riding tribesmen.
- The third campaign is much more traditional Total War fare - and spans Europe. You start out with 7-8 regions in and around France under your control, and have to conquer ~45 regions, including a few specific ones, one or two of which are well into Russian territory. You are at war with Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia. There are various singular-region minor nations - much as E:TW.
~
Overall impressions are much as they were in my last update. I'm still enjoying it. It continues to be an improvement over E:TW in many ways. Battles are still a fun spectacle.
- Artillery plays a bigger part than before. I'm far from having researched all unit types yet, particularly artillery. Mortars are possible but haven't got to them yet. Essentially artillery is more powerful than it was in E:TW, which you would expect with the later setting and thus more advanced technologies of the era. Explosive shells can be quite devastating to ranks of troops.
- Some unit types can do interesting things. Can lay traps during battle - hidden anti-cavalry spikes - and some kind of explosive 'mines' that have caught me out but haven't researched myself yet. Generals have various abilities too - particularly rallying routed troops and that sort of thing. Haven't discovered everything here yet but am sure there are more abilities/troop types to come.
Not sure about replayability yet - but don't think replay value will be huge - I imagine playing any of the four Coalition nations will be very samey.
The new ep for Sims 3 is fun *guilty look*
I'm really playing it, not just abusing sims, even.
We're stuck in a bloody snowglobe.
Lolli, does your little girl play OMGPOP? I just read about it today. Seems to be a popular site for girl tweens.
No, she spends very little time on the computer, despite having her own. She's more of a get up and actually do something kind of girl.
We're stuck in a bloody snowglobe.
(to Lolli's girl)
For any curious gamers, here's how I learned about OMGPOP----
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...d=aVIIBAE5j1sg
Female Teens Point the Way to Financial Overhaul: Amity Shlaes
At first I thought I was reading the Onion
Finished Just Cause 2, now I'm waiting on Assassin's Creed 3 and Fallout New Vegas this fall. As soon as I get a few more paychecks I'm going to pick up a set of 3D glasses and 120Hz monitor. L4D... Tank punching a car at me in 3D... win.
Anyone playing Red Dead Redemption?
I could have had class. I could have been a contender.
I could have been somebody. Instead of a bum
Which is what I am
I aim at the stars
But sometimes I hit London
Its not the third one : /
And yes...why?
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