Tigranes

Well, at least it's more Dreamfall. I've only just started the game but it's a nice one, and it's much more episodic-gaming-friendly than most other games, isn't it? I mean, there's not exactly a lot of 'gameplay'.

Regular occurences don't count.

I don't know. I dived into EU2, and did pretty well for a while - then I got AGCEEP and read up a few things on the EU2 wiki. But then, I'm the sort that *never* reads manuals. There are a lot of complicated things in EU3, but sometimes what things are confusing is different to different people.

Oh, him being a Judge crap? I sorta ignored it. I mean, I played 90% of the battles by clicking Attack, letting Gambits do it and using the computer. EUIII has a lot of 'down-time' waiting for stuff so that's how I got through it - besides which it wasn't a bad game, just a mediocre one. The ending in the end isn't really worth it - FF has become way too similar to Asian soap drama since 10, well, arguably, since 9. But then elements of melodrama had always been present. Did anybody else think Mist was just a silly watered-down reincarnation of the lifestream?

That actually looks really, really fun. No, really. I would totally play larp if it was often like that, instead of standing in a spot throwing little sponge darts.

Same. Especially since Lamont was a pseudonym. Actually, my problem was that I forgot completely about the subtitles option, and got frustrated when I couldn't understand the Judges, Fran, the afro guy - eventually fixed it, and it was no big loss since the plot was so crappily executed, but helped me miss the Larsa bits. Finished the game with my friend's characters just so I could see the ending. I felt that the game was cheated by its own makers; the plot could really have been something special. Dr Cid was an interesting character; Vayn Solidor was totally crap. Vayn's dialogue was stupid and artificial, he had no motivation, no will, no action. If they played upon the "history of man" thing more, and really highlighted the Vayn/Cid faction's great desire to wrest the control of history and destiny from the Gods, if they gave a bit more screen-time to the Undying Ones themselves, if they played more upon the Judges' view of Vayn/Cid's quest, and inserted a healthy bit of moral dilemma (especially progressing more from the very basic Ashe/Revenge thing)... why, it could have been quite a memorable and emotional story. As it is, all those excellent elements are omitted and the player is chasing Item of Power X for no tangible reaso for half the game. It really hurts and the ending appears like some amateur parody of Star Wars or some such movie, and has no real weight. Balthier, however, is cool.

*shrug* Big organisations will always be much much more picky about customer image in that way, and will always value the geenral customer impression over a few dispensable employees. After all, it's not like you're very valuable to them; they could hire anybody off the streets, usually. They don't care about clearing misunderstandings because if that customer goes away and thinks "Calax was a racist but McDonalds still hires them", by law of rumour, everybody who hears it will th ink badly of McDonalds, even if they dont quite believe it, and McDonalds can't do anything to change that. It is only sensible of them, if harsh, to act the way they do.

They liked Tidus, but couldn't make him gay enough.

I would blame someone for prolonging a stupid debate about the most trivial part of the discussion, but I know better. The customer is not the direct and short term reason for your having a job. However, he indirectly and long-term wise is one of the more important reasons that your job exists. Everybody that's argued about this already, knows this already. But hey, what did I just say in my long post abaout Customer Service? People sometimes argue even when they both know what the answer is, and that's just how it happens. If I didn't know better I'd congratulate Volourn for setting up a masterpiece of ironic demonstration.

Played the first few decades on Normal, then the rest on Hard. I see no difference in AI, and VH gives stupid bonuses (+50% morale I think, and tax modifier, etc). I enjoy a challenge and the game could use one, but not in the manner of making other countries have production workers on speed.

Yep, apart from the crazy Central European situation I've concocted, the rest of Europe has blobbed quite nicely. Great Britain has done nothing in a hundred years except for occasional slapfests with France, and when I invaded for a lark I found over a hundred thousand men sitting around playing poker. Spain formed a while ago, sans Portugal, and has ALL of North Africa up to Egypt. the Ottomans inherited the Mamluks and have everything from Ethiopia to Egypt to Persia to the Balkans, and even had Yemen on inheritance for a while. Portugal has all of the west coast of Canada and USA. It would be nice if those blobs actually got into wars and dished out the massacres, but they just go too inactive - I'm not sure how long I"ll play my Dutch empire, probably try to invade France or something before I quit. Super Sweden has been in existence nearly all of the game, after they flattened Norway & Denmark in about twnety years. O_o I I did have one succession war, actually - around 1630. Regency Council meant I lost my HREship for the first time in nearly a century (MILAN took it, who I had revived in Pfalz, visible on first screenie), and I had to choose between Spain and Lithuania. Curiously, when I picked Lithuania, it actually put me on Spain's side against Lithuania. This turned out to be very good because Spain didnt' lift a finger, being far away; I quickly white peace'd Lithuania after some battles and then waited for a King to turn up. Later, I diploannexed Milan and re-released as the Palatinate, just to get the HREship back (see second screenie, Pfalz.)

I'm sure it's possible, because most of the stuff you need would drop from their corpse. Besides which, the FO main quests always have shortcuts.

I think in many ways customers can sometimes be surprisingly angry because the person at the counter, the person at the other end of the C.Serv. phone line, is often the *only* representative of that company or franchise at which they can vent their frustrations. If you buy a product and it is faulty, but that store has a silly policy loophole that excludes you from a refund, in your brain you *know* the guy in front of you apologising is not at fault - he would be in trouble if he didn't follow the policy. But you can't talk to the makers of the policy. The customer often does not have any right or method to speak with anybody else, unless they wanted to ring up and invest a huge amount of their time listening to stupid beeps on the phone, unresponsive representatives then complain to someone. (Often even store managers nowadays do not have the right to do anything about your problem.) So what do you do? You know it's wrong, but you have nowhere to vent your completely righteous anger, and so you do it on the closest representative of their people. That's not as specific a situation as I make it sound. Sometimes it's not even a case of arrogant people expecting everything to be peach perfect when they are being served; espeically in today's society, many people cease to think of a shop and all its workers as human beings, and I know I'm often guilty of that. I tend to live very much 'in my own bubble' and switch between Interaction Mode, and Privacy Mode - the latter takes over when I'm with strangers, walking down a street, window shopping, in fact doing anything in a shop. The fear with which many of us now approach strangers or a public domain, encouraged by the professionalist mask, means many people will not even stop to think about a shop worker as a person - especially if they are in a hurry, tired, agitated, whatever. It is of course not a valid excuse; but it is a reason. What am I getting at, then? If you do not think of them as people, then you tend to have less patience for it. You don't try to understand the other side or give them leeway - do you do that to a coffee machine? The 'service', the product, the people, the managers, all merge into a single 'process' and if there is any mishaps there, then you are irritated because not seeing them really as people at that time, you are not expecting it. Of course there are exceptions to this. Notably people who have worked extensively as servicemen themselves, and know the pains, so to speak; I have worked in brief occasions in such a capacity, but then I am the sort who sits there thinking about my own things all day. THat doesn't mean I will not do my job - I will, but it also means I wouldn't go out of my way to chit chat or be exceptionally pleasant, just professional. Ironically that encourages the atmosphere I talked about above, but in a combination probably of my own personality and the society we live in, I couldn't handle 'strangers' any other way. Some people have this capacity to be actually pleasant to customers; people like me find that uncomfortable and awkward, but then I at least know that's just me, not them, and try not to mind. Others don't have this talent, and thus the best they can do is professionalism. Whether it be Calax or somebody else, I think in the end if you have been in service jobs for a few months, and you find yourself neither liking your own level of service you dish out or the abuse you get in return, it's time to look somewhere else for a job. That's not always possible, of course, but some people just aren't cut out for it, for various reasons. Me? I know I'm much too private, so rather than be angered by customers I would often be made uncomfortable by even the politest of them. That's my problem, so I deal with it myself. You can't tackle head on every problem or every incompatibility, sometimes. I do see a disturbing similiarity in nearly every argument I or anyone else get into in customer service, though. Many times it is a cluster of small misunderstandings or different perceptions that build up a snowball. It can be something as simple as "I didn't know this was $2.99, I thought it was $1.99"; sometimes its a lot more messy. In customer service these days the natural reaction is to re-state the company policy or explain what they know already; which is fair enough, since you can't play considerate consultatnt to every irate customer. But often the same vocabulary gets tossed out again and again, people rpeeat themselves again and again, and misunderstandings are never identified, and both sides just get louder and more angry beating themsleves at a brick wall. Or, sometimes, it's only one side that's doing that, and the other side's patient attempts to rectify the situations falling on deaf ears. But then, what are you going to do about that? Who amongst us has eradicated that kind of regrettable altercations from their lives in so complete a manner? Hey, at least you're not a bus driver.

I've been playing FFXII these couple of weeks, and I too found it incredibly hard until I realised a few things: A) Quickening chains are extremely overpowered. If you get a license board jpg from the net and make everyone make a bee-line to grab 3 quickenings, then the game becomes much easier - if you can make +15 chains, which I always do, then the boss is nearly dead by the time you're done. B) If you don't do any hunts, and if you don't explore the entire area before moving on, you'll be behind. Don't like that, since it's not like their areas are particularly interesting. So after I caught up on the hunts and got the quickenings, the game got very easy. Bosses died in 5 minutes, 4 of it spent on quickening chains; I just fought three bosses in a row and all I had to do was sit there and attack. Final Fantasy battles have *always* been about finding an 'equilibrium', or a 'balance'; you set up your limited number of buffs, and you find a mixture of orders that lets you de-buff the enemy, cure your friends and still get some attacks in-between. Once you establish that equilibrium FF battles just become an exercise in repetition - and this is especially true with Gambits. With the right gambits, I could clear dungeons by walking up to an enemy, droppping the controller then picking it up agin when the monsters were dead, then walk to the next encounter. Anyway, I have to disagree on story and character design. The story was pretty mixed. I loved the early parts; it tried to make a more realistic world where the political and imperial dimensions of the world was much more integrated into the story and the feelings and actions of the characters; you also had a sense that events were really happening as you were spending time adventuring - extremely good. But then, after Bur-Omisace or so it pretty much dies. You don't get any more updates on Larsa or Vayn Solidor; or the empire itself; and the political situation is frozen on Rosaria may declare war for about 40 game-hours, while you are sent on one stupid monkey-errand after another. It actually felt like playing NWN1OC - go to this dungeon and get this magical item. Then go over here and get the magical item to DESTROY that magical item. Oh wait, that was all uselss, go somewhere else and get something else. Characters were also frozen around that time, what with Ashe repeating "shall I take revenge" with no more pondernace or discussion for 30 hours. I'm just before the endgame now though, so hopefully they have prepared something magnificent. On characters? Well Balthier is just cool. Basch is alright, Reddas and Dr. Cid are pretty good, so is Larsa. Vayn Solidor might have been if he was given more than 5 minutes of screen-time. Penelo is absolutely useless and pointless; Vaan is horrible and *exists* soley to say "Huh? What's going on?" and "WE CAN DO THIS GUYS", but then nearly all FF main characters work as lifeless spring-boards for everything else. Ashe was pretty decent, if too melodramatic. Overall the problem is that they have some nice banter scenes, but the huge majority of the dialogue and cutscenes are limited to clipped Plot Summaries, which feel really gamey. It was better than FFX's characters, but that's not saying much. Still, I have an inflated sense of affection for FFVII characters just because of Cid, so there you go. Oh, are you up to Pharos at Ridorana Cataract? Where you have Reddas as guest? Seriously, who in the world of monkey crap makes a ninety-floor tower, and makes you actually walk up nearly every single floor?!

The Rome portion of Italy event is bugged; its mean time of occurance is about 2 months, with no limits on repeated occurances. In other words you're going to get an evil prestige hit (and a BB hit, but that's bugged too so it actually reduces your BB), which was completely nonsensical. I modded it to only happen once, but quadriple the damage or something. Still, I had moved on by then. I've been playing Utrecht from 1453 and now i'm in the 1680s - might actually finish this one. My mission was to first form the Netherlands, become the Holy Roman Empire, then create a "real" HRE. In short, I would try to vassalise every single member of the holy roman empire. Those who play EU3 will know of "Blobbing" that is a problem right now; especially in HRE boundary disputes and all that mean the small nations kill each other off much too qucikly, and after a 100 years or so you're left with massive blobby superpowers, notably Austria, who never seem to fight each other. My mission would be to make war on these blobs one by one, annex all their territory, then release it all as tiny, tiny vassals. I achieved it mainly in all of Germany north of Wurzburg; the southern half would be completely covered by a massive Austria who had S. Germany, all of Italy except Rome, Hungary, west half of Balkans, so forth. <UberAustria> But when I made war on them, I had over thirty tiny German vassals who would all lend a hand, and as I was a massive trading empire raking in thousands of ducats a year from trade (and East Indies colonies), I could fund a smackin', and eventually make them release over half their prodigiously sized empire. Furthermore, I actually inherited Poland, who had over 10 provinces. Immediately I re-released it, but with only half its lands, releasing the other half as things like Bohemia and Silesia. My vassals number at 35 right now, including Connaght and Munster in Ireland. It's pretty fun to still be a relatively small ntaion, but through your vassals and alliances, which you must keep up (even when half of them turn Protestant and you're Catholic), and make sure you defend them and guarantee them. I recently went on a war against Lithuania to get rid of the provinces it had in the middle of my vassal-empire, and secure the eastern frontier - hell, in principle my dominion stretches from Ireland to the Black Sea. <After destroying UberAustria> Anyway, yes. It's a good game but there are a few kinks that do hurt immersion; A) the inevitable creation of massive superpowers that NEVER attack eachother, B) it's much much much too hard to make alliances because they are often impossible for nor eason, C) the AI will not accept peace offers, even when they are much more generous than the ones they offer you themselves. With such errors, the lack of prescripted events becomes jarring; but it's still very playable and hopefully will get better with mods.

Around 1.03 beta days I managed to play MP for a bit on the OC; it all went fine for a while until I crashed. No worries, I came back into the game, only to find that I was controlling my friend's character, not mine - and the said character was in 2 places at once. My movement orders inside the house wouuld make her incarnation outside move, and so forth. Added to that a few tendencies to crash, and it just wasn't really very fun.

Force killing action does not mean killing rampages. I force-killed in BG but I *never* went on a chaotic rampage. Compared to the way you acn roleplay a thief in BG, the later games suck - and IE games weren't that good at thieves anyway. Choosing to rob someone is not a chaotic evil, or an insane / nonsensical act. Sometimes entire quests could be bypassed by killing the quest-giver and taking the item; this can sometimes be justified by even non-evil characters, as necessary for the greater good. Force-killing is extremely useful and is in noway the same as insane killings. I know I played Fallout many times and force-killed, but never went on a 'rampage' and destroyed a town.

Gothic III because the lag-every-1-minute in 1.00 version was really really getting to me. I know I'll finish it at some point though. System Shock II, never got that to work properly on my game. I couldn't get into what little I saw either. Thief II/III, both got savegame corruption before the very last mission and that killed me off. the thing is I love the city missions but especially in Thief 3, I get fed up with mid-game where you have to go to caves and all that stuff. Thief is only really great inside urban settings, without crazy magic and all that. Vampire: blah blah Masquerade, I played the 1.00 version (heh) and the performance was really bad; it also got me that every piece of spoken dialogue, there woudl be a 2-second hang after they had finished the talking, so all combined it really really slowed me down. I liked the game though. Morrowind, got nearly to the end of the main plot then thought, this game really sucks. Oblivion was pretty fun though, but Morrowind was just ugly to look at, and even more lifeless. Never even played ToEE. I havent finished Shining Force 2 yet, but I'm still playing it.

I fired up Oblivion again on a random whim a few days ago and found that I still liked its early-game feel; just the feeling of walking around in a new, not yet fully fleshed out world, with the knowledge that there is so much beyond; playing with the bow and sword combat primitively, hiking up the difficulty slider and getting in real mortal peril; not really being effected just yet by the atrocious balancing scheme, horrible story, daedric ruins or the loot scheme. Unlikely I'll get Shiv, but if done well it could certainly show everyone that Bethesda can actually write / script / design interesting things. They've shown small signs of it in Oblivion with some of Dark Brotherhood and a few other quests, but still.

The thieves portion is much more fleshed out in Act 3, but in Act 1 they are pretty much the same, just blatant mirror images. I would personally argue that the thieves portion was much more fun anyway, but yes. Very nice to see multi-select making its way in and some people recognising just how great the trial was. Really. I think it's because most people wouldn't play the OC more than twice (I've played it twice now, and I'm still waiting to see if I'll get the urge for a third time). But on my second try I repeated the trial a few times selecting different options just to see, and even that made the trial become very different. Coupled wiht the multitude of ways in which your actions BEFORE the trial influence it, it truly was very well made. My only wish is that you could see the evidences presented as well, but looksl ike that was cut.

And perhaps one or more of those "different writers" were, well, not so good.

Nope, EU3 doesn't do it like that. The conditions are if you own Ancona, Rome, and a couple of other key provinces, then every year there is something like a 5% chance you will get the event. This % increases the more italian provinces you own, so if you own all of Italy, then it's very likely that in 10 to 20 years, you'll get the prompt "Do you wish to form the nation of Italy". It's much more realistic than unitiing Italy then waiting 200 years for the prompt... I've seen someone create Italy by 1522, but I dont blitz.

Yes, Germany ends up being a horribly confusing place with about 50 factions that all have similar looking flags, but it all turns out okay in the end. There's still some historical inaccuracy abound, especially in Scandinavia apparently, but it's certianly better than Total War with its horribilities. Played up to 1600 or so. I finally annexed Modena and the Papacy, and am about to diplo-annex the 1-province Sicily. So apart from Naples and Siena I have all of Italy, and I'm just waiting for the Event for the formation of the Nation of Italy. Also going around colonising Brazil and New Zealand, it's pretty amazing that a couple of Fluyts could go out Italy, round Africa completely, go down the Indian Ocean and reach Timor before it dies of attrition.

I remember that list. Good stuff. Can't remember if these were in that list too, but since the link is dead; A) Rats will always, always carry money. These creatures seem to have built an independent economy where they will take human money, keep it carefully preserved and carry it with them at all times. These gold coins appear to operate as symbols of authority in the rat society, and often the leader of each rat community will carry a considerably larger amount of money. Exception; When a rat is broke, it will ensure that its tails are detachable, presumably for a similar purpose. (Planescape: Torment) B) Despite being a hermit in the middle of nowhere who has only ever sold items to yourself and live a life of simple frugality, he will have 1,000,000 gold with which to purchase your loot, such as rat tails. Exception; Sometimes this may not be the case, and shops actually own so little money they would not be able to buy their own merchandise. This is because a mysterious crab has taken all the money in the universe. (Morrowind) C) The game universe, no matter how advanced, civilised or technologically adept it may be, will have only one functional airship at any given time. The giant wheel of Fate or somesuch ensures that as soon as another, usually better, airship becomes available, the previous one is destroyed, usually with a lot of fire and noise. Despite this scarcity of airships, every city, town, cave and ancient ruin will harbour an airport specifically designed, built and manned to service your vehicle during its two weeks of intensive usage. Exception; Your aircraft may sometimes come across less prescient townships, but thankfully you are always provided with an excuse to crash into the middle of it, saving you the need to find parking space. (FFVII, many times)

So, uh, wow. Of all things, the forum maintenance killed my ginormous AAR-ish post. Started off a full game with Milan, Normal difficulty, Sept 1973 (just after it annexes the Genoans). Milan's not a particularly difficult faction, and after sealing off early alliances with Savoy and Austria I'm sitting there building my tech & army up. I am very fond of selecting the inflation idea for my first at the moment - losing the manpower one doesn't hurt after a while and I just love having 0 inflation all game. It's just my obsessive thing. Took me a while to regain the stab, but Milan looks stronger than most of its neighbours after a few years. In 1478 Massimilio I takes the throne with pretty good stats, and I feel with 6,000 men it's time for some expansion. I had sprayed some warnings around before and I had a nice Casus Belli on Venice for going rampaging with Modena, who afterwards became my ally. Venice has no allies, curiously; and it's the easiest thing in the world to DoW and have Savoy, Austria, Modena and myself pouring troops into their lands. Resistance is quickly crushed, and Brescia becomes Milanese. That turned out to be just the start of a magnificent reign for Massimilio I. Ever the honourable man, he refused to declare unprovoked war, and expanded his realm only to safeguard his own interests. Surely he was entitled to take Verona, and force Venice to free Dalmatia and Ragusa, if they were so callous as to invade his ally Modena. And surely Tuscany, who helped Venice work its mischief, deserved to be vassalised. And if the Pope should see fit to take advantage of his neighbours' war exhaustion and conquer Mantua and Firuli? Why, justice is right here at the point of my sword. Massimilio I reigned from 1478 to 1506, incredibly, and in that time I had managed to conquer Brescia, Verona, Ferrara, Romagna, and vassilise Tuscany. Modena my 'ally' was reduced to a pitiful one-state, the Papacy's strength broken, and I was sitting there pretty much unchallenged and suddenly with a lot more income (workshops in all of them, God bless the AI). I was even the Holy Roman Emperor. But just when life seemed good, Massimilio saw fit to get up on the wrong side of the bed and die of concussion. The regency council took over and I lost my HRE emperorship, and whats more, I was forced into junior partnership in a Personal Union with Modena! The next ten years or so meant my hands were completely tied, and I just sat there consolidating my forces and bribing nearby nations. Austria seemed to be the Lucky Nation in my game, because they took this opportunity to expand like crazy. They couldn't do much on the Italian end, but expanded in every other direction, decimating Bohemia, Hungary, most of central Germany and even touching the Rhine near the northern edge of the Alps. All those unprovoked wars, of course, labelled them "dishonourable scum", but nobody seemed to have enough guts to challenge them. And I certainly couldn't, with stupid Modena curtailing my sovereignty. Relief finally came in 1521 when Massimilo II ascended the throne. Not as able as his father, but competent. His forced annexation of Venezia earned him some bad rep, but he learnt his lesson and peacefully diplo-annexed Tuscany, then with bribery placated the worried Europeans. Then he mobilised. Being a Holy Roman Emperor (again) has its perks; one of them is having 30,000 manpower and 65 supportable land units limit. As patience allowed I raised some thirty thousand men (the first of the gun shooters), then with Savoy as my only (and still faithful) ally took on Austria, the largest kingdom in Europe save the Ottoman. The war continued from 1524 to 1540. Non-stop. It was one hell of a war. I made my ruler general, but with low army tradition my other generals were piss poor. I had better tactical movement (of course) and managed to blitz through the surprised Austrian front, simultaneously besieging about eight provinces at once. The problem came when one of his generals, something of a military legend, smashed through all that with 10,000 men and ransacked Brescia and Lombardia. I would never be able to defeat that army, though God knows I tried, but the time used up in those sieges meant I could inflict far more damage on the Austrian Empire. My warscore was 99% by that point. Massimilio II had died half-way, leaving Massimilio III to inherit the throne. I was finally able to solidify my grip on those conquered nations (God bless HRE emperorship), and though the AI in its infinite wisdom refused EVERY peace deal I made, it offered me Linz, Trent, Firuli and Ragusa by himself, and I was happy to accept. Linz is kinda in the middle of nowhere though, but Sell Province doesn't seem to work. The war might have gone on even longer but for the fact that the Papacy backstabbed me, and I had to go back and vassalise him. The Austrian war also let me vassalise Modena, so I'll be able to have a nice block of Northern Italy to myself after that. The Papacy is really crazy - as soon as I vassalised it it went off and attacked *France*, and now it's getting its butt handed to him again. Having lots of fun with the game, although I am disappointed by superfast colonising (Castille has doen nothing in Europe but has about 50 provinces overseas, same with England and France). I've always thought the EU colonising model was bulky and time-consuming and I'm not going to bother now, I think. Just concentrating on creating Italy and staying HRE.