Monte Carlo

--- More Roguishness --- I tried Recliffe Castle with three rogues and a mage (Morrigan). I viewed it as a commando-mission-come-burglary opportunity. The game plays very differently. We used the whole gamut of thiefly tactics - backstab, sneaking, bombs, poison, traps and it worked very well, but I'd suggest that the mage is still essential for crowd control (3 backstabbing rogues on a frozen mob is pretty effective). Imoen Chick is best configured as a pure archer, though, in my humble. Basically, if you like lots of micromanagement, you'll have a blast with the rogues although it would be a bit much even for me to play like this all the way through... I might try the Brescilian Forest / Elf ruins though, just for a laugh. If you like only managing one or two characters and have the rest do their own thing then Imoen Chick is good because you can configure her tactics slots to just stand back and shoot people. Traps are underrated, and MC tip of the day is give the skill to a non rogue because those points have to go somewhere. As for stealing, Imoen Chick pickpockets everybody and although you're picking up fairly minor items it all adds up (equivalent of a gold coin from a quick pilfer of the court at Redcliffe for example). Cheers MC

^ Step into the Tactics thread and we will discuss this at your leisure

I think the whole Grey Warden thing is interesting - after all it's like a really cool special class... with no special abilities whatsoever. Save one notional story-driven power at the end that I shan't reveal. I'm torn between thinking (a) this is actually rather clever - a story-driven 'class' that let's you identify with a role without any tangible in-game powers -- or -- (b) really lame - I like tangible in-game powers. It seems to me that the Grey Wardens are basically like the Foreign Legion: desperate men who can tolerate drinking nasty substances during the hazing ceremony. Anyway, a real moral choice would have been to become a nihilistic, demon-tainted, blood-magic junkie who becomes a Dark Warden, becomes one with the Archdemon and helps The Blight spread even further afield. A bit like NWN2 in fact. It's no biggie, am really quite comfortable with the people-doing-bad-things-to-achieve-noble-aims schtick, hey the Mage Tower is obviously a simile for Guantanamo Bay (chuckles). Cheers MC

I can't find all this exciting evil blood magic stuff anywhere, I'm feel like the guy in the adult movies section who can only find Mister Bean DVDs. Do you have to be a mage or something?

In an ironic piece of marketing altruism, you can make money for the (otherwise excellent) charity War Child by playing this game* online at the weekend. I know charities need money but why does this make me feel ever so slightly uneasy? * Edit: MW2 is the game I'm referring to.

^ Nope, nuthin' to do with Orzammar. It just appeared in my rogue's inventory... perhaps yesterday? I did preorder Dragon Age and got it on release day, maybe it just DL'd via that Big Brother online verification thing.

^ oh yes it can Anyway, Musopticon thanks for the heads up, it looks right up my street. It's online D2D as per Morgie's link (I like calling him Morgie, it sort of takes the sting out of his tail) but can't find the XP, I'd like to buy them together but not via Steam. Cheers MC

Strange. A magic dagger called The Edge (no, not the bloke from U2) appeared mysteriously in my inventory. Is this a free DLC item I'd missed?

^ thanks, that was v helpful.

I was looking to get it with the THQ collection set, heck it was the main reason because I've had difficulty finding it. Would you mind making a few comments about how you found it, gameplay etc? Am looking for a fun, old-skool H&S to play after DA. Cheers MC

^ Morgie, was it you playing Titan Quest? I have questions.

Whilst Sawyer burns the midnight oil, committing his thoughts to papyrus with the ink made from the ichor of a ****atrice egg, I shall say what I'm getting at. Developers have written frequently of the need to escape the orbit of pen & paper game mechanics to properly fit the medium of computer gaming. And they're right. The tricky bit is, how do you do this yet retain the soul of what CRPGs are? After all, it's a bit like modern artists building installation scultpture and saying they need to escape paintings by Pollock or Warhol - when by a process of osmosis that's partially where they've come from themselves. Dragon Age is, in a sense, immensely disappointing from this POV. It comes across as a hard-hearted decision - make a game familiar enough to MMO / twitch / console gamers but with a hat-tip to old school CRPG players. And the result is strangely lacking in flavour, and (crucially) seems semi-detached from the setting. What is a rogue in Ferelden FFS? Where do the little sub-classes fit in? Why with so many options are classes forced into little boxes like sword and shield or two-handed fighter? I only mention DA because I imagine it was a pretty good place to be for Bioware designers - original IP, your own ruleset, your own world to tinker with.... and yet they came up with this. Like I said, I actualy really enjoyed the game. I like Dave Gaider's thinking man's Ed Greenwood mish-mash of Celtic & Dark Ages mythos. But the ruleset... it's like making a soup with stuff from an expensive farmer's market but using powdered stock from the budget store. So my question to the Obsidian guys, whose work I know and trust, is what would you have done? Not specifically to DA, but in that fantasy football scenario where you pick your own new game with all that clout behind it. How do you capture the spirit of the genre, break new ground and make a more satisfying experience... and still shift units? Cheers MC

Am I the only dipstick who didn't find the hidden stash of juicy loot

^ For me, moral ambiguity is all about the dividend between "do I kill him and get the loot or let him go and get the XP?"

^ Yeah, but will there be tunnels? and fighting in tunnels?

Slowtrain, I love wargames. Tactics, strategy, what if? history. I don't like these ultra-violent FPS war shooters, I see them in a different genre completely. However, I'm of the Airfix generation, you know the WW2 model kits? I grew up with war comics, war movies, a lot of men in their late 40's onwards had actually been in the war. So I grew up with those stories too. So for me a game like Company of Heroes is a lot of very powerful, nostalgic stuff from my childhood made real on the PC.

I wanted to like Oblivion. I tried to like Oblivion. Oblivion is the type of game I SHOULD like. Big, open, non-linear, stats and quests, flaming swords and monsters. That's my stuff. But in the end, I couldn't do it. ^ +1

^ Yeah, I wonder if the PnP Dragon Age game uses the same mechanics, they make 2E AD&D look elegant.

^ Indeed, on the chat function it went: WTF WTF!!! DOOD WTF!! ??? as they tried to figure out this new smurf-tastic piece of spamming. I did manage to zero in a couple of arty strikes on exposed ground (that was sort of one of the inchoate ideas swirling around my ale-addled head when I started pumping points into jeeps), I think I blew up some scenery in an impressive piece of tactical indirect fire coordination. Anyway we won, although my jeeptruppen had nothing to do with it. Somewhere out there in CoH land there are some guys probably desperately wondering how to master jeep-spam. But the secret is mine

I think you're onto something: Medal of Moral Ambiguity. Although a tactics game where you channel money via shell companies in the 1980's might be a tad dull, although an Ollie North avatar would rock.

Don't want to bore you by putting on my military history head but a shed-load of UN units served with extreme distinction in Korea. It's an epic, if under-publicized, conflict. Vietnam tells it's own dramatic story, with yes valour by combatants on both sides.

Why not Medal of Honor: Korea or Medal of Honor: Vietnam?

Cronicler, many thanks for that detailed and very helpful post. I'm not using the DEX hotfix, am waiting for the patch. What should I do in the meantime?

^ Sword and Shield looks vanilla and not much fun, but actually it is. Bashing enemies to a pulp with a big metal disc and hurtling smugly into a wall of arrows knowing they'll bounce off is cool, as is being last man standing 99.9% of the time. Cheers MC

Ha ha ha. I have invented the newest CoH spam tactic. JEEP SPAM! Yes, spend thousands of manpower points swarming crappy, extremely fast but very frail units into enemy lines. As a tactic, it's rubbish. As a way of getting everybody else in the game going WTF? It's absolutely priceless.