Tigranes

Thanks all. I'm thinking ESB, Statue of Liberty and Times Square are not high priority - higher on my list is MOMA, Guggenheim, Central Park, etc. But I'm working out exactly how long I'll be there, so perhaps I'll have time for a more diverse diet. I've revealed sufficient information about myself on these boards that it should be pretty easy to find out who I am through google. But yes, I'll definitely take some photos (despite being the most un-photogenic person in modern history).

That... is exactly how Medieval kingdoms worked. Especially if your grandson has any traits like Ambitious (a -50 to relations between vassal and liege). I think CK2 works best if you don't plan out your perfect history, but let the weird things happen and screwballs reign. You should read the manual about succession laws, what each one does and how to change them. You can keep everything, it might get divvied up, you might have to engage in canny assassinations to keep things, etc. (Hint: an easy way to take rival heirs out of the running is hand them bishoprics, as bishops are ineligible.)

Blank's campaign, nevertheless, stands as Obsidian's longest running D&D thingy of all time.

I think CK2 is great, but as you say there qaer problems. To me it comes down to the fact that combat is too simplified and too easy. A powerful duke that hates you is a much greater threat to your kingdom than any war, if you're a large power. And of course, frequent rebellions when wars are easy is annoying, infrequent rebellions when wars are hard is exciting. I think they need to do a variety of things. Minor things like levy recharge rate, army maintenance cost can be adjusted, but more fundamentally, I think (1) bring war exhaustion back; (2) make technology progress faster, have more levels, and have much bigger impact on battles. That may sound ahistorical for the time period, but arguably it simulates how well equipped and drilled your armies are, not what new-fangled contraptions you are coming up with; (3) do something about the fact that due to the levy system, every army ends up having 10+ marshal skill generals on every front. I've conquered all of Spain by 1200, mainly due to the stability of a crazy 70-year reign from one guy that inherited at age 2, but I might start again as some smaller states.

Too long, didn't read? You're the reason we have "I want to be a Dragon" now, instead. *fist* And so here we are, still horribly underleveled, in the island of angry, hasted, regenerating, immune to normal weapons Werewolves. This should go swimmingly. (Oh wow, I can only post 5 images per post now? THIS CALLS FOR A REVOLUTION)

My original intention was to go straight to the cultists' den and take on Aec'Letec, but we are horribly underleveled and somebody told me to go punch some werewolves. So, we take a blatantly suspicious quest from someone who weirdly oscillates between perfect English and Asian English. A quick trip to Baldur's Gate to pickpocket the sea charts... ...and some more Captain Obvious foreboding story mechanics. Hey, stick some bloom and ring-a-ding sounds on there and it's a nextgen game already! May yer bait be most delectable, man. And so we head towards Mystery Island. These storyboard narrations are nothing special, but the voice acting is quite excellent. The most striking one, of course, is when you exit Irenicus' Dungeon at the beginning of BG2. We'll get there. Someday. Gorth: Wait, so we're predestined to end up tortured in a dungeon? TrueNeutral: Well, you always need to start Season 2 with a bang.

With Sword Coast Strategems this is an extremely difficult battle. They start with an invisible assassin that could easily chunk most of our party, mages capable of casting confusion and other disabling spells, and of course we cannot pre-buff at all. We take the safe route by having Tale and Sorophyx gulp invisibility potions. The party then retreats to better ground. This proves sensible; the assassin soon reveals himself with a strong but not fatal hit on Nepenthe, and Sorophyx backstabs her in turn to eliminate the primary chunking threat. TrueNeutral's call lightning is unfortunately too late and lands on the assassin's corpse, but it will now periodically strike a random enemy, so all is well. More importantly, Tale manages to get in a Greater Malison + Emotion combo to down several enemies. And in the next turn, slow. Tale's pretty useful now, actually. Improbably, we get through the entire fight with no losses, though I'd say it is actually more dangerous than the House of Helmed Horrors before.

Finally, we're back at the High Hedge, to pick up a Robe of the Archimagi for Tale. Of course, we don't have the 20k+ that he's demanding, after all our recent expenses. Tale: Wait, then why did we even come? Oh, it wasn't my idea... Sorophyx: BANZAI, CAPITALIST SCUM! Dude, you told me you can get him in one hit! Sorophyx: Sorry. He must have munchkin'd his CON score. Tale lends a helping hand, and Thalantyr expires with no chance of defending himself. Tale: Wait, what? I didn't do that! Sorophyx: Ha! You landed the killing blow! Tale: I didn't- he made me do it! He made me cast magic missile! Sorophyx: Yes, yes. Now take the bloody robe from his corpse, and EMBRACE THE DARK SIDE! Tale: Wait, this isn't the robe of the archimagi! It's a standard traveler's robe! Gorth: One of the mods must have replaced his inventory to prevent griefing. Fascinating. Sorophyx: Well, that's alright. We still got some XP. Tale: But now I can't even buy a robe of the archimagi! I'm going to be stuck with positive AC all the way through! Sorophyx: Oh, who cares? You never do anything anyway. I should note, by the way, that at late game I don't see the point of having to identify everything, so I dropped some gold on the ground and gave myself 99 identify scrolls. It's an interesting mechanic when you have no gold and few items, but later, it's just a chore. Anyway. We now have no choice but to return to Ulgoth's Beard; most big pockets of XP have been plundered by now. We are immediately confronted by mysterious cultists that demand the dagger we found on the Death Knight's body in Durlag's Tower.

The mage proves just as cheesy as us with insta-spawns of helmed horrors. We open with wand of the heavens and a wand of the paralysis - you can see it has gotten one of the horrors in the first turn, making things easier. All is going well until the mage throws a confusion spell. Tale, Gorth and TN (who is, you can see, now level 3. Woo.) fail saves. Gorth starts shooting TN in the face. The latter doesn't even have any armour, being a shapeshifter. I believe that took a total of two hits. We all gotta go sometime, buddy. All that done, we take care of a couple of other things in the city, being careful not to be seen by any Flaming Fist guards (who will go hostile and attack us now). Walsingham employs his ol' blighty silver-tongue to avoid a fight with an ogre bounty hunter. Walsingham: It sort of helped that he thought I was Tale, to begin with.

13. Cleaning Up Walsingham: Look, I'm not backing down from this. The pie is the single greatest invention in the world of pastry and I will punch you in the face until you admit it. Sorophyx: You can punch me, but that won't change the fact that you're stupid and your pies are even stupider. TrueNeutral: Great. Next he'll say your mom after every freaking sentence- Tale: Guys! I think we're filming again! Gorth: I thought we got cut due to low ratings? Tale: We must be getting government subsidies or something. Come on, back in character. Nepenthe: But I forgot what my character was, now. Sorophyx: A loser with an inactive phallus, pretty much. Nepenthe: Yeah, and you're the bastard everyone hates and eventually dies horribly. Sorophyx: It's the journey that counts, not the destination. Because nobody remembers, here's a recap: the Obsidianites somehow survived Durlag's Tower, though they lost half the party in the process. Now fairly high-level Tale, Nepenthe and Sorophyx are carrying low-level Walsingham and Gorth, and totally low-level TrueNeutral as we try and crowd-source some XP for the endgame. I think Wals/Gorth are level 3, and TN level 2 at this point. Yeah. They have like 30 hp between them. As part of that, here we are in the city of Baldur's Gate, the mysterious questgiver mage that wants Balduran's fabled helm and cloak. The knights on the left are a fair challenge, but even worse are the invisible stalkers that keep popping up to attack the soft underbelly of the party. Gorth cops it, I believe for the first time. Sadly, the high casualty rate of recent days has inured the party against any outcries of grief. In the end we resort to Tale running around furiously, waving the wand of paralysis every six seconds and hoping to land some save fails. It works, and we manage to avoid further deaths. Remember, kids, cheese will get you further than love, intelligence or money. Usually, there are two options with this quest; return the items only to have the questgiver teleport away and hand us some measly XP/gold, or refuse to complete the quest and fight the mage. Here, we break the RPG mold with a revolutionary third option: procure all the items beforehand then kill the dude for XP. Yeah, give me a break. Between 3 underleveled characters we've got at least 100,000 experience points to catch up on.

You won't feel that way after you've completed about 70,000 tasks, though. Saturday, and that means more work as usual. Today, my prestigious education system has taught me that earlier versions of the Little Red Riding Hood amongst the French peasantry involved the wolf tricking Little Red to devour her own grandmother's flesh, then proceed to undress and take to bed with the wolf, where she was herself eaten.

Because it's apparently criminal to not go to New York if you can, I'll be going up for roughly 2 or 3 days next weekend. As a provincial I have literally zero clue as to what to see and where to go. I invite you all to exercise some cursory influence on my life through advice on this matter. I generally enjoy museums, shops of oddities, live music, etc., and am not quite as fussed about photogenic tourist spots or big shopping malls. I'm fine with walking around but mobility to more 'remote' areas is probably not for the best. I also tend to get lost quite easily, but that's OK. So far I have the blindingly obvious like Central Park and the Met. As you can see, that's not the best of lists.

Better than the original in almost every way, and finding wives is now a pretty quick affair. I'm currently celebrating the fiftieth year of Alfonso the Wise's reign, wherein he demonstrated his wisdom by surrendering to local dukes to give them the right to declare war on each other, thumping some Muslims when they were preoccupied with other powers, assassinating rebellious Dukes at opportune moments, and somehow managing to keep the Kingdoms of Leon, Castille, Galicia, Portugal and Andalucia together. Also, he's currently on a decline into senility as he drowns himself in drink and frolicks with his third wife half his age. (But he's chaste, so no danger of too many children!)

I don't know. I really like some of the games released these days, but I can't think of any I'll want to come back and play again and again for the next 5+ years, whereas I'm still having a lot of fun with Baldur's Gate. The Witcher series are the games that I really love when playing but I'm surprised by how little I care to go back to them; Skyrim, which I thought was a great way to redeem Bethesda, doesn't either, whereas I keep thinking I want to replay Morrowind (even if the actual experience of replaying doesn't quite hold up). I think FNV would have a shout here, if the combat system wasn't so silly to begin with.

Cossacks is a very, very fun game. I sunk many an hour into Cossacks LAN in teenage years, mainly with a friend who would refuse to ever play competitively but build the most historically accurate of battle formations. He'd probably have won all the games if he didn't stop to role-play all the battle commands through in-game chat.

Oh, Obsidian most definitely has a reputation as releasing buggy games. That is indisputable. Whether you could accurately compare the 'bugginess' of their games with other companies and establish them as objectively buggy is another can of worms, but true or false, the reputation is there. More importantly, everything we know about the circumstances of Obs' previous games, Onyx and DS3 shows that Obsidian having learnt some lessons, having settled on Onyx, etc. means we can expect their next few games, especially South Park, to be not very buggy at all - which is good news for everyone. Personally, I don't really worry because I'm so used to buggy games - Bioware I think is the only RPG developer that is consistently not very buggy. Probably helps that in my particular case, KOTOR2 was the only Obsid game with significant bugs.

AP used a third party Unreal engine.

English, Korean. My French is in lamentable neglect, and I wish I had the discipline to stick with it properly when younger, and my Ancient Greek is hardly there anymore. I think recovering those two would be on my list, though I'd also be really interested in Arabic.

I played AP a lot, lot more than DXHR, but that might have a lot to do with the nonlinearity and good writing, both of which were sorely lacking in the latter. I think HR did better at core shooting mechanics (I liked AP's, but can see how it pissed people off) and level design, but that's about it. I actually think the big thing that killed AP was polish and the appearance of being an AAA title. People weren't impressed enough and AP didn't look 'solid' enough in the first 2 hours for them to keep trying and discover all the good stuff. With something like HR, most people keep going because nothing stands out so bad to make you stop. It's not quite the ye olde television least-objectionable argument, but that logic does drive a substantial amount of video game reception.

I tried Alpha Centauri recently, and it left me cold. Just seemed to play exactly like Civ, except a lot less intuitive due to the sci-fi-ness, some cool flavour text, a few cool minor features. Will have another go at some point though, great games have proven my first impressions wrong before.

It is currently (just) good enough to run IE games on Android/iOS, though when I tried, the mouse system was just too clunky (same for other similar emulators). Could be great for ipads and the like, though.

After having tested the game, I chose to change. Replaying now with the Komnenos dynasty. Of course, the objective is to become emperor of the byzantian empire. But it's hard at the moment. I think they made the byzantian empire to cohesive for the period. So, after having married a daughter of the emperor (to get a cb), I took my independency (hardest war I fought at the moment) and began to grab parts of my future Jerusalem kingdom. It seems easiest than grabing the emperor title the way I thought doing. I may next time try ploting, it seems this mechanism can help weakening your liege. I played a hurried, rough 100 years as a fringe Doukas and the empire always seemed to be on the edge of destruction. I counted more than a dozen civil wars where around half of the duchies had risen up against the Emperor - though, in many cases, the latter prevailed eventually. I think one King had a reign of 30 years where he did nothing but stomp on rebels. I wonder if technology-wise the Seljuks and other Arabs are too weak, since they were also helped by many successful Crusades that conquered pretty much the entire coastline. But then, for the Byzantine Empire the real deathblow was neither Seljuk military power nor even the frequent civil wars, but the deterioration of the land system and tax infrastructure in Asia Minor that gradually destroyed the manpower and money base. I think in general Crown Authority needs to be reworked a bit, so that each step in the ladder is a lot more significant and it's a lot harder to change them at will.

Gave out chocolate domestically and internationally. Doing my part for the market.

Playing Crusader Kings 2, very pleased. Apparently it still has a few bugs but I haven't seen any and the interface is very good. Started as the nephew of the Byzantine Emperor to try and see if I can intrigue my way to the throne, or at least, an independent kingdom.

That's not just Sweden, you know. Not everyone lives in US, UK or Korea. Couldn't buy my Crusader Kings II from gamersgate because paypal was being stupid, now I'm waiting for it to unlock on Steam while GG version is already out. That itself is not a big deal, but there's a very, very simple logic - the more middlemen and intervening processes you introduce to the distribution system, the more annoying it is for the consumer.