Humanoid

Winter Games is a better game than any Summer Olympics titles was or ever will be. The real life thing, no so much.

Heh, I mostly just assumed it'd be the same as MM6/7 and never checked it either. Only just got to The Crag last night. Dang, this place is a maze. I've complained before about placement of certain expert trainers in Seahaven instead of Sorpigal, but placing your master trainers here might arguably be crueller. I know they're *trying* to invoke the spirit of the past games, but a bit more of a fair progression here would be helpful in balancing.

I find it interesting that debates like these tend to immediately turn to discussions about soldiers and command and other military-related things. The game description tells you straight up you can be a villainous thief (or hell, villainous bard - not sure how that works, be a rock 'n' roll star?). And that's almost certainly what I'll be playing regardless of what gender options are made available in the final product. If it's a good game, then playing it this way ought to be a completely different experience to those players who choose to have their characters enlist in the army. About as big, if not moreso, than, oh, being a woman. In either case it's making more-or-less a whole second game in the same shell. I might find myself supporting an inverse stretch goal here. At 1 million, remove the feature to be anything but one 'class', and tell a nice focused, character-driven story like The Witcher. I'm somewhat afraid the supposed choice of path otherwise will merely be showing different icons on your hotbar, and that as a thief they'll still be expecting you to, in the words of their blurb, "lead the charge in enormous, open field battles and sieges." Now *that* would be a blow against realism.

The guy in the wagon will always fill you up to 9, this I can guarantee. I just can't quite recall whether it's a flat fee or a variable one depending on your current supplies - I was pretty confident it did take them into the account, but Keyrock is making me doubt myself. The inn in Seahaven will fill you up to 13 days, the inn outside Karthal something higher, and the inns in Karthal and the Crag... well, who knows, it's lower than that last one so they're irrelevant.

Moving the camera is an available but useless option in this game, purely aesthetic, so no up and down. As for rations, I was under the impression that the price is per unit that varies, but you only pay for the units to take you up to the maximum. So technically it's most efficient to buy from cheapest then top up from the more costly ones. But really, the price difference is so trivial it may as well not have been a mechanic. For what it's worth though, the largest supply amount you can get is from the inn outside Karthal. Not in town itself, just in the area around it. You can get there during act two, but there are a number of tough encounters around it, so it's probably not worth it.

Well I say that because until October last year, I was still stuck using IE6 for work... Although in the last year or so if it, they belatedly added Firefox - version 13 mind - as an alternative browser. But work-related applications still needed IE6. Since then the desktops have migrated to Win7. Which means an upgrade of Internet Explorer .....to version 8. Yeah.

Some bloke? You just have to zoom close enough into a portrait of Seagal to make sure his double chin and hairline are cropped from the final image.

Yeah, but in the manner of the small Nico parts in the various Broken Sword games and no more. I'm actually not a fan of playing stories from multiple sides, as it tends to break up one's sense of character ownership. The Banner Saga had this problem recently, as do many strategy games where the campaign consists of playing one side up to a point in the story, then playing the other - indeed it's much worse in those situations where the different parties you play are enemies because you're then actively undermining yourself. But I digress - I just want to say I'm not sure that this stretch goal would be a positive development. Smarter perhaps would be to establish the character and have them be the player character of an independent second game in the series.

The Witcher is a nice example because Geralt is static in much greater of a fashion than simply being a guy. I mean, he's a Witcher, not a spice merchant or a doctor (or, y'know, a thief or a bard). And despite the huge choice you make in The Witcher 2, both choices reflect the same personality, and are pragmatic in very similar ways, as opposed to when other games have completely divergent (in terms of character personality) good vs evil choice, or paragon vs renegade choice, or whatever. So apart from relatively minor alterations to fighting style, your Geralt in the end is the same Geralt everyone else who plays the game gets, for better or worse. This is a static character. Being the child of a blacksmith, then being able to do whatever you want, and be whoever you choose, is not a static character. Now I'm not saying their decision is the wrong one. It is a lot of hard work to add the option, making sure the game world reacts in a believable way. But it's also hard to make the game world react differently to a popular bard than to a decorated soldier - or are they going to handwave that away and have everyone treat you like a generic commoner? So perhaps yes, those resources are better spent elsewhere. But don't try to play the Bioware-esque 'artistic integrity' card, because the honest answer is just a matter of resourcing.

When I saw those screenshots I thought it was meant to be an ironic poke at Keyrock's post immediately preceding the pics. But I guess in that context they're somewhat overdressed.

Yeah, but in those cases they're likely using Internet Explorer ....6.

Not that I've tried it, but I think the main thing holding back a very magic-heavy party is not so much encounter balance, but money. Magic is an expensive business. But still, as you get into Act 3, cash stops being a real concern. I'd also envisage a lot more rest abuse, and therefore probably also the hassle of having to go back to town now and then to restock supplies while mid-dungeon.

So part of the reason why the game runs so poorly, and draws so much power (I notice my PC heating up quite a bit more than most games). It has some insane overmodelling, with some floor tiles (y'know, flat surfaces) apparently consisting of up to 1200 polygons. One thousand two hundred. That's worse than the worst of Bethesda's notorious modelling excesses. (Give them that kind of polygon budget and they'll at least manage to make a boulder) But yeah, insanity.

I turned them off when I noticed it was mostly them trolling me. "Hey, did you hear something? Oh, no it was nothing." Nothing on the alert meter, it's just something that happens anywhere, anytime. Also "Ow, that hurt" - zero damage received.

Yep, that's the point where I called it a day as well - controlled about a starting faction's worth of territory. Just be aware that it's extremely likely that you'll get dogpiled soon after declaring independence, the game is hard coded to make all leaders have extremely low opinions of newbie rulers. Early days of independence will likely consist of days and days of defending sieges.

Only possible in Warband I think? And it'd be extremely tedious with dozens, if not hundreds of battles involving thousands of troops each required (since the AI cheats and raises instant armies). With that in mind, I'd probably estimate the point where you found your own kingdom represents, oh, about 5% progress to actually "finishing" the game.

All the weirder that the Druid promotion quest is just "hey, go talk to this other NPC" with no combat involved whatsoever. Haven't promoted any of my characters yet, so not sure which is closer to the norm though.

And yeah, they don't lock out prior areas if you've progressed to the next one, so it's perfectly okay, and in fact assumed, that you leave the harder challenges in the first area alone.

Daggers first - that is, always the lower damage attacks first. Plus you have four dagger attacks per round (assuming expert daggers) as compared to only two sword attacks. And use your Blade Dancer to Shatter instead of Challenge. Theoretically if your Ranger has Shatter it's viable too, double the chances to apply the effect, but Rangers have fewer points to spread around for utility skills since presumably they'd be raising magic skills instead. And as the amount of armour reduced scales with Warfare skill, it's not an optimal long term choice to leave the Ranger on one point of Warfare anyway. The Prime spell, Sundering, though useful, is different to Poison Spray in that it reduces armour, not evade, therefore it increases your damage but not your chance to hit. Shatter is also an armour reduction, as is the Master Earth spell Acid Splash. They're all good abilities, but don't affect hit chance and therefore won't help your Defender tank hits for you. And yeah, I think that order is pretty much optimal.

As far as I can tell, the target of enemy attacks in this game is completely random - i.e. 25% for any one character. (Previous games behaved similarly, but with hidden modifiers in that certain enemies might prefer attacking certain classes or races - e.g. goblins would mostly try to hit the dwarf) The idea then, is to use the Warfare skills to put that shield and heavy armour to good use. If you try to raise the survivability of your other party members too much, it rather defeats the point of the Defender, who performs no other real role. So really, you want to use Challenge every single turn if at all possible. But there's a catch - unless it hits, the effect doesn't work. And Defenders, with the massive hit chance penalty from wearing heavy armour, don't hit all that often. As a result, the Defender is not a very commonly taken class, as there's a lot of catch-up work that needs to be done to make it work. But to give it the best chance possible, there are a few things you can do. - Attack with your Ranger first every round. With four strikes per round, there's a good chance all the little strikes will eat up the target's block charges (the number of possible blocks - or more specifically, block attempts - per round is limited). Attacking with your Defender after the block attempts are exhausted means you only have to deal with misses (which is a function of your weapon attack value versus the target's evade score). To make this more convenient, put your Ranger to the left of your Defender in the party layout (you can drag and drop them anytime). - The expert Earth spell Poison Spray reduces the target's evade, and as a bonus is an area effect spell. Consequently you want to use this before the Defender attacks as well - and as the Ranger also benefits from this, you actually want your Earthmancer to act first. (My party setup left-to-right is Rune Priest - Bladedancer - Barbarian - Crusader to use this logic) - As with any melee class, weapon skill is god-king. But for heavy armour classes, the heavy armour skill provides an equivalent attack value boost (but no damage increase, so it's still strictly inferior). This more or less means you want to max out these skills in this order at the expense of all else. The defensive skills aren't of much benefit if you can't get the enemies to attack you in the first place, and your natural survivability is pretty high anyway, so skills like Shield, Endurance and Dodge take a back seat until you're maxed out offensively. Besides, with this approach, it means you should be able to get away with ignoring the Perception stat, and get much better value elsewhere. Note: In theory it'd be even better for the first move per turn to be the expert Light spell Radiant Weapon, which is meant to strip the target of all their blocks for the turn. I'm informed, however, that it doesn't actually work.... The general opinion on Defenders is that they're a bit of a drag for the first half of the game, maybe even two-thirds. They're sturdy throughout the game, which is nice, but can't reliably use that longevity to actually protect the rest of the party. Once Defenders reach Grandmaster Warfare, the game changes because Taunt is vastly more reliable than Challenge (I think it skips the hit check, and less foes are immune to it), and with Master shield, you have a lot of blocks, each of which can trigger retaliation attacks. When you get to this stage, Defenders are very impressive indeed. EDIT: Block mechanics aren't immediately obvious, but it's fairly simple. There's the number of block attempts per turn (call it X), and then there's the block chance (call it Y). The first X attacks against a target are rolled against Y% to determine whether it's blocked. Now, block chance and block chance bonuses from items and skills may look pitifully small, but that's only a bonus on top of a base block chance - this is 50% for player characters. (For enemies it'd be whatever hardcoded value was set for this enemy type) So with a 10% bonus from stats and items for example, every block attempt is calculated at 60% chance to block.

The best game of 1998 was Grim Fandango. DAMMIT DISNEY JUST SIGN A DEAL WITH GOG ALREADY!

I guess it is a bit of a preconception, but also a bit of an irrelevance in that it's something I'd never have been interested in anyway even if it featured genuinely good gameplay. I believe the last military-themed shooter I played was the original Battlefield 1942, and even then only briefly. (Incidentally, I remember one of my very early posts in this community, back in the BIS days, was about whether it was worth getting as a single-player game. The answer is hindsight is obviously a firm 'no'.)

When will Battlecruiser 3000AD be up then?

Well I despise ME3 and discarded it after maybe a quarter of the way through (it's somewhat irritating that it's often defended by people saying only the ending is bad - no, the beginning is just as terrible, and so is the middle), so it's not an unreasonable guess that I'd prefer Spec Ops over it had I ever played it.

Never played it, but all the feedback I get regarding it seems like a case of some cleverclogs being annoyed at one constant property of modern shooters, then, instead of taking a few minutes to write a forum post about it, decided to make a whole generic and mediocre game as a delivery method of that singular point instead to ram the point home in a tedious fashion. It's the same reason why I despise the critically acclaimed Lord of the Flies (both novel and film adaptation) as being terrible wastes of time. But in Golding's defense, he had no Internet forums to outline his points on back then. Huh, that rant turned a bit more vitriolic than I had intended.