Checkpoint

The game probably failed to load following some excessive Danish war success.

I think it's detailed enough to be on a day-to-day basis. What I meant by historical monarchs being in the game was related to that. If you start as England in say 1590 you'll have Elizabeth as your queen, but if you start as England in 1453 you'll have Henry VI and a completely random monarch in 1590.

From what I gather, no. Though there will obviously be historical monarchs for the entire era in the game, given the whole start-at-any-date thing. Personally I'm excited about the prospect of having random monarchs, since EU2 got very predictable. Having said that, there is a risk that the balance will be screwed when the AI doesn't have any natural guidelines to follow. I think there's a great risk of strange over and under powerings going on.

Yes and no. Given his age and injury proneness it's remarkable, but when you consider what an amazing talent he is I guess it isn't so odd. He was great in Ottawa last year when healthy, so it's only natural that he keeps performing this year too. I guess the main worry for the Wings is that he'll get injured and they'll be let down by their goalie in the playoffs yet again.

3D is, as usual, the poorest plug for a game of this type, but whatever sells it to the kids. The game is supposed to have more forms of governments and alliances (like personal unions and stuff) and the concept of national ideas which will allow you to direct your research towards certain branches of the "tech tree," as it were. Added to that there will be more realistically sized armies, random monarchs and the possibility to start at any date in the game's timespan (something that only makes me wonder if they didn't put in too much effort into a mammoth task that couldn't possibly be very accurate). The focus on stuff like that (start-at-any-date) and 3D makes me skeptical, and it probably won't be playable until after a number of patches, but at the same time it's bound to end up better and more enjoyable than EU2, which would speak volumes. We know that Paradox are great at still patching their games years after their releases, which still, however, makes you wonder why they just can't seem to get it right in the first place?

What I hated about last game was how Marc-Andr

Obviously RP is respecting our more sensitive grammatical sensibilities at Obz. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I.e. we would have ripped him apart...

Er... Thanks. But how is your post anything more than a summary that couldn't be gathered by reading a relatively short thread? We went off topic right after the first page... Also, I think I'll change my username to "The Originator of This Thread." The Destroyer of Worlds. The Annihilator of Injustices. The Originator of This Thread. Yeah. That rocks.

That's exactly how Kasparov was beaten by the IBM Deep Blue; the computer was busy scanning all the possible moves from the current position, so that when Kasparov eventually made his move the computer moved immediately. Part of the psychological strategy of the IBM team. (It is a commonly held belief that Kasparov was the superior player; the IBM team used all sorts of meta-gaming techniques to put him off his best game.) <{POST_SNAPBACK}> If only a strategic computer game could psycologically intimidate the human player...

Interesting indeed!

Well, I'm not playing the hardest level in Civ IV. The difficulty there is very much based on cheats which I don't like. The problem with terra maps, though, is that the AI is bad at going after the new world and its resources. That, in part, is also related to its poor navies.

I liked the progress made from Civilization III to IV, but the AI there is still very beatable. Particularly so on terra maps.

I mostly play strategy games, so yes. I'm obviously not advocating "unbeatable" AI, but I'm sick and tired of the dumb behaviour generally displayed to wonder what the reason is for all this. All this input actually helps me, though.

What makes you say that? " :D I'm referring to games like Europa Universalis 2 as well, though. I realise that chess AI is easier to program, but it was just a parallel given the near impossibleness of beating certain chess AI compared to the AI of a host of computer games.

This is not my field of expertise, hence the query. Why is the AI always dumb? We know that they can make chess AI that beats the best human players in the world and so on, and I don't really know how much time that has been put into developing such AI, but what is the poor AI in computer games down to? Lack of time? Or is it simply an intentional decision to keep it at a certain level so as to not become too hard? If it is the latter there obviously is a problem, because I imagine it is very difficult to create AI's that have different depth for the same game. Is it this problem they have to address? Do they go "people are too stupid, so for the better players we'll just have to give the AI cheats that won't help it anyway since it's too dumb to put its new-found cheat assets to any real use?" The next problem is, would the majority of strategy-game players be that stupid? I'm not going to pretend I'm the best player out there, but I still manage to beat a lot of strategy games on the hardest difficulty setting. The AI is predictable and inefficient, and most of the time you can out-think it to compensate for its cheats. Is it simply just difficult to make good AI? Sometimes it just feels like they put a lot of time into a game, and then its ruined by the AI saying "we declare war! lolz!" and proceeding to mess things up. I just can't help suspecting that the game developers underestimate the brain power of the regular strategy gamer.

I've been playing some with the Lands to Conquer 2.0 mod, and the AI is fairly sucky. It declares war on you left and right, and most of the time they get their collective arses handed to them. I (playing as the French) was also invaded by Scotland, who really should have been more eager to accept my alliance proposals, only for them to abandon a siege on one of my cities in order to declare war on Denmark, who had a city next to mine. :crazy: Then as I'd taken Rennes and Caen from England, I was finally about to negotiate a peace with them. Their clever action was to buy my diplomat, so that I coudn't open negotiations... :crazy: It also seems a touch too easy, even with modded battles. I haven't lost a single one, even with the odds against me. Sure, France have some good leaders, like that faction heir, but come on!

Isn't the name Harry Potter actually in the game?

Wow, those were some wacky goals the Oilers got last night. Well, whatever it takes to win a freaking game, I suppose. Regarding Nedved I think that if there's anywhere he'll find some of his old touch it's with the Oilers. Considering the price I'm not against the acquisition at all, now just don't get tempted to put him with Sykora and Hemmer.

The Germans couldn't have succeeded with the Schlieffen Plan (or, at least, the Moltke-modified incarnation they implemented) and the trenches were inevitable in a time where infantry was the chief ingredient of an army. The only thing interesting about the pre-stalemate war was troops walking along roads. Marching and time tables for trains somehow doesn't equate interesting strategy to me.

Although those things are bugs and not game design issues, I've come to understand that this game is virtually useless without some proper mods to deal with it. I've just installed a new HDD and another GB of RAM, so I'll be getting this game shortly. I suppose it's the ever-present case of "we must dumb the game down and make it arcadish or the kids won't buy it," when in fact it's a strategy game and the last thing you want to do with those is dumb them down too much. I'm looking at mods like Anno Domini, but I'm not entirely sold on their idea of dynasties replacing "countries," since I don't think that representation is perfectly accurate either. I'd rather have countries that I'm familiar with than a bunch of faction-specific dynasties that only comes to interfere with the houses of other "countries."

I hear you, but I think marketing it to westerners might be the obstacle that dissuades them. China isn't as easy to sell as Japanese Samurai after all. Regarding 1914 it could be interesting - for a while. Battles were very repetitive and very rarely decisive, and as we know the whole war was a grind for the most part. I say nay. I would like to see something set in the early modern period, wouldn't mind Napoleon at all but preferably something starting in the 1400s or 1500s. I guess I'll have EU3 for that, but I want to play as SWEDEN! I'm such a patriotic dork...

Are they scripted like events coming at certain dates? I would have thought they'd come up whenever you reached that "level of technology" through city growth and so forth. I do remember now, however, that there were events regarding the Europeans and Christianity etc in Shogun. Hm, personally I don't mind the wait. I'm more concerned with the prospect of having too easy a time preparing for the Mongol invasion and such if the years "move slower," as it were.

Are you by any chance trying to sell us something?

OK, I think me and my friend may have run into some of that AI suspicion by impatiently exterminating difficult-to-appease heathens. We played as the Turks and even though we kept beating the Byzantines and chased them out of Asia Minor and captured Constantinople (which we renamed Istanbul! ) ), they just thought our peace offers were too demanding. It's fun boosting the dread-o-meter, though. We did have a successful softie, though, in Selim the Chivalrous who sorted some dire situations for us. I think that with the emphasis put on seasons and aging every second turn, the most logical course of time should be two turns a year, and that also seems like the original idea. I guess they found that too unbalanced, however, and solved it by simply making turns span a longer frame of time which seems like a bit of a panicky way to address it. The Anno Domino mod appears to be promising, but will it solve this problem?

But the game is about strategy, not tactics. The point is that you aren't the general, so what more do you expect of combat? The thing I can find a bit stupid is that there are no "battles" per se, where the two sides round up on a sunny day and you have an outcome, but generally I don't expect to have anything to do with the actual combat when my task is to run the empire and not single battles. On that note, I'd love a TW game where you'd get to play battles in the EU era, but they might get a tad too large given the bigger number of troops involved. I suppose its my urge to get to kick some butt with Sweden in a TW game.