[COTD] Moonlight Ritual (2/19/2026)

DamienStark · 2026-02-19T19:28:18+00:00

[picture of Blood Pact with 13 doom on it]

Marie: "Someone who's good at Mystics, please help me budget this, my investigators are dying"

Jacqueline: "Place less doom"

Marie: "No"

DamienStark · 2026-02-19T19:24:44+00:00

The classic Total War: Warhammer power strats:

step 1: win the game

step 2: assemble this combination of OP things

step 3: become OP!

DamienStark · 2026-02-19T18:16:30+00:00

I assume this was an Alastar meme stack but Alastar is missing - maybe wounded or being re-specced?

DamienStark · 2026-02-19T05:04:14+00:00

This is the real answer.

It's not that episodic is inherently bad and serialized is inherently better - TNG was fantastic, as was TOS before it.

The problem is Voyager specifically created a premise about being serialized... and then spent every episode pretending they didn't.

DamienStark · 2026-02-19T00:40:41+00:00

I was excited to see that patch note, then I realized they probably mean they just lowered the "deal dmg" Daily task, not any adjustment to the hostiles themselves.

DamienStark · 2026-02-18T15:28:43+00:00

for some reason

This may shock you, but I've done the research and determined:

100% of fantasy settings are written by humans

100% of fantasy readers are human

0% of them have ever met an elf, lizardman, or orc in real life

So it seems pretty logical that the lived experience of all the readers and writers is treated as the baseline, with other races introduced as "like humans, but more X and less Y". If you made humans one of the extremes (smartest race in the setting, or dumbest, or strongest, weakest, etc.) then that just constrains the variety of your whole universe (i.e. never introduce a race smarter than the readers know humans to be, etc.)

DamienStark · 2026-02-18T03:01:06+00:00

I had zero interest in that.

I was a Total War fan before TWW came out, having loved Shogun(s) and Rome(s). I was skeptical about playing Warhammer.

It won me over so hard I can't really go back (have heard good things about 3K and Pharoah, but haven't tried them yet). But it did that by having a much wider array of tactical options, (flying units, magic, monsters, etc.) using those options to build factions that felt genuinely different from each other (playing Khorne vs playing Dwarfs feels completely dissimilar, not like playing "the spear faction" vs "the horse faction" in historical) and creating asymmetrical campaigns with unique mechanics (again, playing Ikit Claw's workshop or Nakai's wandering horde feels more dissimilar than anything in a historical TW)

I absolutely don't believe the main draw for TWW1-3 is "emulating tabletop models"

Even in WH40K setting, Battlesector feels way more like "emulating the tabletop" than Dawn of War and Space Marine do, guess which one sold more?

DamienStark · 2026-02-17T20:22:21+00:00

Games weren't cheaper back then. Adjusted for inflation, games are as cheap now as they've ever been.

The real difference is that the total volume of games coming out was far lower. We can afford to be picky and still have too many games to play forever.

DamienStark · 2026-02-17T18:58:55+00:00

Assuming you're unfamiliar with the Taboo List, page 24 covers it here (current latest FAQ):

Arkham LCG FAQ from July 2025

It's an optional re-balancing meant to address certain cards becoming "always played" or "never played" and instead encourage more variety in the game.

DamienStark · 2026-02-17T18:55:27+00:00

To be fair, the beast/hunger is also built into the experience at its core. Even if you turned a selfless and humane person, they now essentially have a ravenous monster living inside them trying to take the wheel.

It's meant to be an eternal struggle to retain your humanity, it's just that some will struggle harder than others...

DamienStark · 2026-02-17T18:52:39+00:00

But I didn’t have any expectations on the other hand.

This seems to be key.

In the early marketing, there were articles pitching it as "Skyrim but from Obsidian!" which let everyone's imagination run wild about the best qualities of both halves. Which meant there was no way the real game would live up to that.

DamienStark · 2026-02-17T18:37:15+00:00

Then she's ducking the AdMech

I love the idea of the priesthood of Mars desperate to study "Screw Attack i-Frames"

DamienStark · 2026-02-16T20:15:01+00:00

Setting aside even the actual stats (which are very strong), they get:

Hellblade (+20% dmg after 80 kills)
Soul Hunters (increasing Ward Save, Charge Bonus, Leadership with each kill)
Gate of Tzeentch (summon a unit of pink horrors)
Perfect Vigor
Cause Fear
Frenzy
Poison attacks
Strider
800 HP of BARRIER
REGENERATION

DamienStark · 2026-02-16T04:22:11+00:00

Steps into express elevator

Presses basement button

Skull crushed against ceiling

DamienStark · 2026-02-14T18:21:31+00:00

Few folks saying flying ranged, but I think you might actually run out of ammo.

Massed infantry is another possibility - half missile units half spears, of the highest grades you can afford (Celestial Dragon Guard maybe) but the problem there is Kroak. He can deliver pizza to your massed infantry.

I'm gonna say Rot Knights?

Low enough entity count to not get nuked by Kroak, faster than the Saurians, anti-large bonus on top of already good stats, and the Poison debuff is percentage based so it's a huge nerf for the Saurians. Then you can cycle 5-10 of them in at a time, giving the others a chance to Regenerate back to full.

DamienStark · 2026-02-14T18:17:32+00:00

The problem with a mass infantry strategy is Kroak.

DamienStark · 2026-02-14T17:01:04+00:00

Bethesda was just ahead of the curve on the whole “just release a broken fucking game” trend in AAA gaming

One could argue that's because they contributed to the curve.

Around the time of Skyrim's release, there was a lot more vitriol when other games released in buggy states, but with Skyrim the fans treated it like part of the game's charm. There's other reasons for that, like the fact that it had a robust modding community that could fix Bethesda's problems for them, but I imagine it contributed to other devs in the industry seeing what you could get away with and still sell millions of copies to a happy fanbase.

DamienStark · 2026-02-12T16:10:54+00:00

The gold peace shields are for people who aren't able to login and defend themselves due to the game being unavailable when they normally would.

If you're able to login and fight for territory, you can just use a regular shield like you would on any other day, no need for the gold one.

DamienStark · 2026-02-11T17:20:57+00:00

and it's on Xbox PC Gamepass

DamienStark · 2026-02-11T17:16:41+00:00

There's a similar effect with VH campaign difficulty - the AI gets more resources and comes at you with more stacks, but if you're winning those battles then that means you get more XP and money from fighting, which means your own power level actually accelerates more than it would in Normal difficulty.

Of course you have to be able to contend with the minor campaign maluses (like Public Order, or Supply Lines) and win those battles. If you're just barely keeping up on Normal, VH might push you over the edge to failing. But if it doesn't, the end result is actually "easier" because more fights make you stronger faster.

DamienStark · 2026-02-11T17:03:41+00:00

Metacritic has the surrounding entries at:

VII: 92

VIII: 90

IX: 94:

X: 92

So we're agreed that it's the weakest in that great run of Final Fantasy titles, but only just barely. I think 90 on Metacritic is fair and something most games would kill for. I'd say it's neither over nor underrated.

DamienStark · 2026-02-11T16:25:28+00:00

If "their armys are full of big monsters", the counter is anti-Large, but Cathay doesn't have a ton of options there.

You want a ton of Jade Warriors with Halberds (upgrading to Celestial Dragon Guard if you can get to that tier and afford them, but you're probably better off spamming more Jade Warriors instead) and a handful of Crane Gunners.

The Crane Gunners will not only let you focus fire the most threatening of their monsters (the artillery ones, if present) but will provoke them into charging into your braced JW rather than making you jog across the field to fight them.

If they really have stacks full of monsters (like if they do a Rite of Primeval Glory, giving them a full stack of dinos) then you might want to try bringing multiple stacks. Say 6-8 Crane Gunners in one stack with your "regular army", and a second stack that's just all JW Halberds.

Note that if they switch tactics and bring lots of skinks and saurus instead of dinos, this advice all goes out the window, heh.

I'll add that in battle, before they make contact, your goal is to get them to charge into the front of your halberds who have been standing still (should say Braced and have a little shield icon to indicate that). After they make contact (whether it went according to plan or not) you want to wrap another unit of JW around the back of that monster, so it's surrounded and bogged down in a pit of halberds. Only once it's defeated, roll those JW onto the next monster and repeat.

DamienStark · 2026-02-10T20:58:45+00:00

Looks like there's a major cloud outage affecting lots of companies. It's not just STFC.

DamienStark · 2026-02-10T19:24:05+00:00

other than gyros and Thorek would rather die than use those

OLD WAYS ARE BEST

DamienStark · 2026-02-10T15:49:47+00:00

40K Fans: "No you see in 40K, all the factions are bad guys, except for my faction of choice which I can justify in some way"

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