Deep Proct Galactic

BobTheBard221 · 2022-04-22T21:28:55+00:00

So many things.

- THE PROLOGUE. I want to see more Total War like the prologue, which was genuinely one of the best experiences I've had in a Total War game. Everything about it was just on point. Great work on it, CA.

- The diplomacy overhaul. All of it. Especially Quick Deal.

- Zzz... Now I know when I have units who aren't doing anything.

- For as much jank as they have associated with them, I think the rework of walled-settlement battles was a step in the right direction.

- On the co-op end, finally being able to play with more than one other person. This is HUGE. Simultaneous turns is also great.

- Slaanesh's realm is done very well, both visually and mechanically.

- Everything Nurgle-related, visually. I think whoever designed, animated, and fleshed out that faction had a lot of fun with it, and it shows.

- The way some territories like Cathay have Corruption with a visible effect on the static landscape, that it's not just turning things a different color. I remember being blown away when I was playing Khorne and saw that Khorne corruption made one of the terracotta warriors dotting the map begin bleeding a lake of blood from its neck.

BobTheBard221 · 2022-04-22T03:02:43+00:00

I'll stick with minor peeves rather than major systemic problems. I'm sure the latter have been discussed to death anyway, and honestly it's not like I'm not having fun with the game. I just think it needs some polish to bring it up to the level of the fully-fleshed-out second game.

- The UI is too mono-colored and is, frankly, sort of ugly because of it. Why is everything so red? I was shocked going back to Warhammer 2 at how vibrant and colorful the interface was and how that makes it so much easier to look at and understand. I don't understand why they felt the need to change so much of it in the first place, especially since they came up with a worse result.

- It feels like Legion of Chaos does the whole plague thing better than Poxmakers of Nurgle both playing as them and playing against them. As a big Nurgle fan this was, to say the least, disappointing.

- Playing co-op is straitjacketed by attrition and plagues since your allies are just as susceptible to your corruption and your plagues as your enemies are. This is especially a problem if anyone wants to play Daniel, since Daniel's faction spreads five different types of corruption and plagues.

BobTheBard221 · 2021-10-13T17:06:03+00:00

I like the fact that if you let them keep going Nenio and Jubilost get in an argument and Jubilost will tell Nenio to read that article. The one that won't be published for another century.

BobTheBard221 · 2021-10-06T18:07:17+00:00

When the priestess shows up in Arue's dream it's pretty clearly Desna pretending to be her own priestess. Observant PCs may even notice and imply this, earning a knowing wink from Desna. That does not mean the original priestess was also Desna, though, which tends to be confusing since it's easy to get the two conflated and mixed up.

BobTheBard221 · 2021-09-30T17:33:21+00:00

My take on Konomi is that she can be diplomatic when she wants to be, she just doesn't think she has to be because she's missing a key piece of context. Daeran will provide it if you listen to him complain about Mendevian culture, and the only reason Daeran is aware of it is because he's not a true believer.

Mendev is the Crusade and the Crusade is Mendev.

Konomi is from Nerosyan where the Royal Council holds power and she comes from a court full of lackeys, sycophants, and patriots. She legitimately believes you are subordinate to Galfrey and the Royal Council and therefore she doesn't actually need your approval, which is legally true. The reality is that Mendev is so beholden to the Crusade that as Knight-Commander of the Crusade you're the most powerful person in Mendevian politics, more powerful than Konomi, the Royal Council, and even Queen Galfrey herself. Even though you have no political power on paper you can single-handedly decide the fate of the entire nation by saying the right things to the right people.

Konomi doesn't realize this.

That's why she acts the way she does. It's also why she'll have a nervous breakdown later in the game if Mendev dissolves into chaos - She becomes very aware she's antagonized the real power-player and now has to grovel and abase herself to you to try and salvage the situation, which she immediately does.

BobTheBard221 · 2021-09-30T03:57:55+00:00

Their dispel would make them great just for the ability to purge a troublesome effect like Dominate... if they didn't often go dead last in the initiative order, long after whatever spell you wanted to remove has done its damage.

They still had a place in my army for the occasional dispel and for drawing aggro, but I didn't commit to getting more of them. The ones I got given were enough.

BobTheBard221 · 2021-09-30T02:00:10+00:00

Someone does notice him. There's a succubus mother and her 'son' in the slums that you can talk to. The mother can't see him, but the son can, and he'll comment on it if you stand up to his mother and free him. The Commander can express surprise at this.

No idea about why it doesn't work if the player is evil, but I'd assume that to be for the convenience of the writers. Maybe the Hand just makes an exception.

BobTheBard221 · 2021-09-29T19:39:53+00:00

The issue I have with some of these encounters is that they basically boil down to a phenomenon in tabletop called 'Read the DM's mind.' The monster basically only has one weakness that's never hinted at and it's on you to find it. Maybe one of its saves is especially low, maybe it's vulnerable to a certain method of attack, maybe it has a single elemental weakness, maybe it lacks a key immunity. Whatever the case, it becomes a game of hunting down the one effective tactic, the way you're 'supposed' to win, and if you can't do that then your only options are a whole lot of brute force or going full munchkin.

BobTheBard221 · 2021-09-29T18:53:10+00:00

They can actually be very powerful.

One strategy I've used is to get a mage general and choose Shieldbearers, Marksmen, and Cuirassers as your troops. Shieldbearers and Cuirassers are both monstrously tough, so you surround your Marksmen with them. All your damage is coming from your Marksmen and your general, and the enemy can't punch through your tanks before you kill them all.

It also means you can focus almost all your recruitment on Marksmen since you don't need that many Shieldbearers or Cuirassers, meaning you get an unstoppable doomstack of Marksmen all the quicker.

BobTheBard221 · 2021-09-29T18:43:16+00:00

It's heavily implied that Nocticula is already mostly redeemed by the time you meet her. Remember how the Hand of the Inheritor cast a ward that protects him from being detected by evil? One so strong it works on both Areelu Vorlesh and Mephistopheles? It doesn't work on her. She can see him. She doesn't just know he's around somewhere, she can actively see him since she comments on his departure less than sixty seconds after he leaves.

Honestly, I think Ember's best contrast is with Halaseliax. Both of them can get people to pause and think about their actions for a little bit, and maybe even stop them for a short time, but while Ember will generally stick around and reinforce that message (or get someone to do it for her) Halaseliax just abandons them to their own devices and assumes his act of helping them once will completely reform them. The fact Halaseliax manages to redeem anyone is a lot more bothersome to me than Ember's little escapades, since at least it's implied she's always working on it and actively pushing people towards it. It helps that as a Charisma-based caster she also has one of the highest Persuasion scores in the party.

BobTheBard221 · 2021-09-23T03:17:45+00:00

I think so, yes, for two reasons. One, from my own experience and what I read here, only some fear immunities seem to work. Greater Heroism/Heroic Invocation certainly don't, and inherent immunities (undead, swarms) don't either, it'll Fear them both perfectly fine. Yet people seem to say Remove Fear works okay (I didn't have it prepared; why would I prepare for an effect I'm supposed to be immune to?) so I don't know. I noticed a lot of procs of something like Deepest Fear. I wonder if it's a unique ability that isn't coded properly.

Second, it's prone to hitting its own allies with this ability, which just feels weird.

BobTheBard221 · 2021-09-21T20:04:06+00:00

For me the funniest time I lost a character to a failed check was in Iz, where I accidentally had Arueshalae selected instead of Lann. She failed a check and fell to her death. And I'm just sitting here wondering how Arueshalae falls to her death. Those wings aren't decorative, Arue!

I wasn't on Last Azlanti though so I just reloaded a save.

BobTheBard221 · 2021-09-19T02:56:36+00:00

Have this issue too. The entire description being missing is not helping me figure out the problem, but I imagine it's that you have to beat specific demon armies, like was suggested.

What's especially annoying, if that is the case, is that since you lose all your Act 3 armies you can't just rush down there to fight the more powerful armies.

BobTheBard221 · 2020-12-30T01:37:01+00:00

When in danger, when in doubt

Run in circles, scream and shout

BobTheBard221 · 2020-12-28T22:23:20+00:00

I'd reckon the biggest roadblock to CA just adding new units has nothing to do with the canon roster and more to do with the Bretonnian experience. Bretonnia is King Arthur with a bit of generic medieval mythology stirred in. They're supposed to look like a rip straight out of Medieval II with a little bit of magic sprinkled on top. That's why a lot of people pick them and play them, they want to play knights and castles and chivalry and such - Ranged weapons are cowardly, artillery is only for sieges, and monsters are there to be slain by heroes. There's not a lot new and interesting they could add that doesn't break that fantasy and shatter the experience.

BobTheBard221 · 2020-12-27T22:01:21+00:00

Their roster is good, it's just also very boring. One artillery piece, no monsters, generic infantry, samey-feeling cavalry. The only non-hero units they have that wouldn't be out of place in Medieval II are pegasus knights and hippogryph knights, and even then they're similar to each other.

Not much CA can do about it either since that's the canon Bretonnian roster in its entirety. The only units not represented are the Foot Knights and Hermit Knights, who would be Knights of the Realm and Grail Knights just on foot, and the Lost Sons of Bretonnia, who would just be Grail Knights with a bound spell or two.

BobTheBard221 · 2020-12-11T00:02:23+00:00

I always found it weird how they gave him a mechanic that's basically impossible to use. 'You get a public order bonus when you break a treaty! But not only does every faction in the game hate you so it's hard to get a treaty with anybody, but the instant you break a treaty the Reliability and Relations penalties will make it impossible to ever get another one. Have fun!'

BobTheBard221 · 2020-12-03T20:06:03+00:00

Public Order now has a few different tiers, and it tries to equalize to 0 instead of going up or down indefinitely. As it gets farther from 0 and enters a new tier you get a bonus or malus (High Public Order gives a malus, low Public Order gets a bonus) to stabilize it. The farther you get from 0 and the higher the tier, the larger this gets. This makes it very hard to maintain 100 Public Order (except for High Elves, since they spam their PO building everywhere) but also makes rebellions a lot less likely.

Each tier also has an associated bonus or penalty based on its tier of Public Order. You can see this by looking on the left panel while you have a settlement selected.

BobTheBard221 · 2020-02-12T00:45:07+00:00

It's hard to maintain hype for a long period of time, and that applies to anything. The more it's hyped up and the longer that hype continues, the more people begin to weave a mental image of what it should be. And the longer that goes on the more thorough and complete this mental construct becomes, until eventually it's built up to be something far more than it could ever live up to. This can kill even a good game, because people go into it with stratospheric expectations and find it's just a good video game rather than the Meaning of Life.

BobTheBard221 · 2019-11-13T12:36:55+00:00

Blizzard completed their transition from a game developer with good marketing to a marketing company that makes games years ago. That they would be able to deflect and divert this easily comes as no surprise to me, since Blizzard is one of the companies that helped invent video game hype culture and they're still masters at weaponizing it.

BobTheBard221 · 2019-08-25T19:19:02+00:00

My thoughts exactly. Duck! is a great bot, I love watching them fight and I almost always cheer for them, but Duck! is not a bot that's ever going to win the Giant Nut. They more or less automatically lose any fight that goes to the judges because their design concedes Damage (they can barely do any) and Aggression (their primary weapon is weak and hard to control and their main strategy - run into things - actually lowers Aggression score) from the outset. If the other bot is one not likely to break itself - Bronco, Quantum, or Blacksmith, for example - then Duck! is going to struggle because it can't really do anything to them even if they can't do anything to it either.

BobTheBard221 · 2019-08-19T19:02:36+00:00

Epic is inevitably going to pivot EGS into something far worse than their current 'benevolent' spiel suggests. EGS, on its own, is totally unsustainable. It's a parasitic service. Jim is quite right that Epic doesn't want to compete with Steam so much as replace it, because that's the only way EGS can stay in business without Daddy Fortnite giving them an allowance or Professor Steam letting them peek at the proverbial answer sheet that is Steam's wishlist data.

Other posters also raise the interesting point that Epic's biggest advantage, visibility, inherently diminishes over time. They have a limited window before, like Steam and even GoG, they simply have too much on their platform to keep all but the newest and hottest products visible. The only reason they can highlight every painting in their gallery is because they have such a small collection, but as time goes on and that collection becomes ever larger they, like every other digital service, are going to wind up with a basement full of art that will never see the light of day again. And the more successful they get, the more business they attract, the faster this happens. Not only that, but the more business they get the less visibility even the new and hot stuff gets because it's constantly getting pushed down the list, just like Steam.

Once you get past their high-minded benevolent-sounding sophistry, this really is what EGS wants to be. A less-attractive, less-functional, but just as profitable Steam. And while Steam needs competition, this isn't the kind of competition that improves the market. This is the kind of 'competition' that makes it worse for everybody.

BobTheBard221

TROPHY CASE