Monte Carlo

This is a pet hate of mine. Have Bio explained, perchance, why not?

We really need to move the conversation on to fighting. In tunnels. I don't understand all this other stuff.

Your kill ratio is ass-backwards and it's one of the annoying things about MTW:2, the manpower ratio for attacking a fixed position should favour the defender against odds of at least 3:1. Mongol hordes in MTW:2 are also broken, legions of elite infantry / archer hybrids, super-powerful heavy cav and freaking nebelwerfer style rocket batteries. That's why I play as England and deal with them in the high medieval period when I get some decent arty on the field and firearms. I have defeated them, the easiest way to degrade the horde is repeated assassinations to weaken their bloodline. Five-stack armies led by a one-star general are much easier to pulverize. Mind you, as a reminder of the all-round scariness of the rampaging mongol horde that makes you gulp when you see them appear on the map, CA did a pretty good job. Cheers MC

^ Yeah, but scandalously the TW:Empires add-on features don't port into the vanilla game. Happily, there is a mod that rectifies this (Retrofit and Kingdoms Grand Campaign mods). Ramza, get empires and the mod that segues all the features into MTW:2 vanilla campaign. It makes a brilliant game awesome. For example, you kick off the campaigns on the British Isles with the Scots, Welsh, Irish and English. You get all the different units. It's extremely good.

Thinking about my last answer, you get outrageously powerful cavalry as Byzantium. If you are prepared to sacrifice a unit of Cataphracts (or whatever they're called in MTW:2) then this ain't a problem. Charge them full pelt into the infantry using the ram, preferably from a flank, and they should panic and run off. You will lose the heavy cav unit, but it might well be a sacrifice worth making.

Fire arrows are slightly nerfed in MTW:2. You need the next tier of city defences to burn them properly (flame ballistae, burning oil etc). Byzantines are a tricky faction, even on normal difficulty in the vanilla game (the others being the Holy Roman Empire). My personal tactic for taking out enemy siege engines is to create a small force of light cavalry (3-4 squadrons) and let them sally into the battering ram, kill 3/4 of the unit operating it, then retreating them back into the castle. Your archers should do the rest. Do this until you tech up and are able to deal with siege engines, or alternatively play as England. Being an island you won't get invaded, you get longbows which used properly are a big shiny WIN button. Cheers MC

Dark... but not too dark. Ha, sounds like my favourite chocolate from Green & Black's. I'll have my own tilt as to what constitutes 'dark.' Nope, it ain't relentless violence (although violence might indeed be significant) and it ain't everyone being a complete basterd (note new Tarantino spelling to baffle language filter LOL) either. Dark is the mood music. Ferelden ain't very dark. There's dark stuff going on... but like Dave Gaider says, it ain't too dark. The rest of it is fairytale castles and dudes wearing comedy gold pantaloons. What is? Well, Elric of Melnibone is dark --- the whole Eternal Champion saga is. Why? The settings are, by and large, fantastic dystopias (beautifully realised). Doomed anti-heroes who take occasional comfort from crumbs of humanity and the satisfaction of doing good things (in usually bad ways). Flashes of humour lighten the tone like the brush-strokes in a good painting. It's an exercise in how to do 'dark.' Bio has confused a bit of cleavage, murder, poorly pixellated blood-splashes and Macbeth-level perma-betrayal for 'dark.' Cheers MC

Yes, things pass me by. Company of Heroes was out for two years before I even noticed it.

Still playing Company of Heroes, am looking forward to the new Warhammer 40K game and God of War III. The comments various forumites have made here is making me curious about The Witcher, I might take a look. Usually games where you play a pre-defined character are a big turn-off for me, but enough people here who have views I respect have clearly enjoyed it. Cheers MC

The art isn't to my taste and Dave G, I suspect, is on the verge of becoming a romantic novelist.

^ I'm not sure that's entirely fair, Boo. It actually looks interesting, I'll be picking it up later on in the year.

Why on earth would I do that?

Sten is the best NPC in the game. He's done something very, very wrong. He wants to die. He asks for no mercy, and expects none either. He loathes you, partly, because you offer him redemption in an honorable death in battle --- which you delay. OK, the way it's written you don't get much choice but that's a design fault. Mary Kirby can, IMO, take credit for one of the best Bioware NPCs for some time. Distinctive, nuanced, occasionally amusing. You even take him along despite his sub-optimal characger build. Vol, if he offends your morality leave him in his cage --- the darkspawn will slay him when Lothering falls. No problem. Cheers MC

Alignment is so, like, last century in RPG behaviour paradigms. Let's all move on.

^ I eagerly await a Qunari artillery minigame.

That Gamebanshee review is pretty much on the money, except that I would disagree about the combat... a bit. Yup, it's slightly too grindy but it's still good for a contemporary CRPG. Like everybody else, I'm interested in seeing where the franchise is going. Hopefully beyond the whole Grey Warden / Blight schtick, I like some of the nations they've described (The Imperium for example) and think they are solid enough to carry any number of plots. Cheers MC

I'm wondering how you have DA2 without Grey Wardens / Darkspawn / Blights etc. It seems to be the core of the setting. Not that I'd mind, I think Thedas is interesting enough to support a totally different plot but I just can't see Bio making the leap out of such an obvious comfort zone.

^ Wrong. How about a Shadowrun game set in 1972? Richard Nixon is a warlock, the monsters all wear flares and you can tear about in a Ford Camaro with laser guns on the hood. Groovy.

Mwuahahahahhaaaa!!! As for a tougher arch-demon... it's a Bio game right?

I vote for the Chaos Warden option --- let Ferelden fall as a firetrap for the Darkspawn to feed on and then reinforce someplace else for a counter-attack, a la Duncan's strategy. As the game makes clear, Ferelden is a backward place that smells of dogs and is run by buffoons. To hell with it, Chaos Warden's end cutscene sees the Archdemon raze Denerim as our (anti) Hero smirks, riding off to take advantage of the break in hostilities to form a new army. Of course, he sweet-talked the dumber NPCs to make their last stand with the Fereldens....

^ That's incorrect. If I leave my laptop, iphone and wallet on the backseat of my (unlocked) car door I can hardly complain that the police weren't doing their job properly when someone steals them. On the other hand, if I block the road both ends with rubble so nobody can walk down the street and booby-trap my car with dynamite in case anybody tries to break into it then I'm in the wrong. Copyright infringement is multi-jurisdictional. In some countries the legal infrastructure is good, in some it is poor. In certain parts of the world the authorities might have bigger problems to worry about than Ubisoft losing some money. That is an issue for Ubisoft --- and there are things they can do about it. Cheers MC

Until the very end DA robs you (robs I say!) of the sublime feeling of hitting level 19 and mowing through swarms of mooks like a tsunami of death. And when DA does give you that opportunity, it feels cheesy and contrived. I don't like the levelling either. Cheers MC

Security compliance schemes across all areas of human activity are problematic. Any crime prevention expert will tell you that --- it's the argument of proportionality. We could eradicate virtually all acquisitive crime by imposing curfews aggressively policed with heavy-handed sanctions. Execution or state-sanctioned indeterminate sentences for narcotics possession would put that one to bed. We could curtail people smuggling with privacy-degrading biometric ID cards for all. And so on. But they're not proportionate. In the UK the identity card scheme has cost hundreds of millions of pounds and is heading for the dustbin of political history. People asked, not unreasonably, why the government wasn't taking less draconican measures like actually enforcing the laws we already have to address the issues the ID cards were meant to solve. It's the same with gaming. The industry simply puts the smackdown on the honest. There seems to be little or no effort to punish theft. And it's wrong.

The movie industry, more analagous perhaps with gaming, is also managing quite nicely thankyou. In the UK IP bans for copyright infringement are beginning to become more popular. Any business that penalises the honest because it's easier than prosecuting the thief is on a hiding to nothing.

^ No, actually it isn't boring without a mage... it's an entirely different game. I played about 75% of my third playthrough without a mage... 2 x tank, 1 x melee rogue, 1 x archer (PC DW rogue, Alistair, Sten, Leliana). It was a lot of fun, the PC was a trap / bomb / backstab maestro, Al as meatshield, Sten as damage supremo and Leliana as all-round AK47 goddess. Some of the boss monsters were a pain, but it wasn't boring at all.