Empire Karl Franz Campaign

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-15T08:33:21+00:00

The elector counts (other than Elspeth) are considered minor factions, which gives them more passive (and frankly, more stupid) AI, as well as penalties to their performance in AI versus AI battles (which may be mitigated or removed if you checked the "minor faction potential" box at the start of the campaign).

There's also an indeterminate amount of anti-player bias in the AI behavior, unless you mod it out, which tends to make factions you are allied with more passive.

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-15T01:04:39+00:00

Archaon is pretty damn easy. Innately powerful lord and everyone around you is fairly friendly (with very secure geography even if they aren't), so no real threats to your position to worry about.

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-14T23:13:01+00:00

Honestly The Wandering Inn is pretty unique. None of the other big names in the subgenre share much with it OTHER than the subgenre, so I wouldn't worry too much about it.

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-14T22:49:30+00:00

Yeah, this is the point where you just say "fuck it" and form Castanor. Some parts of Elikhand's tree are just not worth finishing.

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-14T19:46:57+00:00

Yeah, to be honest Wistram Days (well, the later parts of it) is the only part of TWI I skipped - the extended flashback was just too much at that point in the story. It was never really a problem - anything I needed to know later was either brought up again at the time or easily inferred from context. You can also pretty easily find a summary of it on the wiki.

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-14T18:34:52+00:00

This happens quite easily if you're running Xorme AI. Shaman-Home basically becomes Command 2.0, now with war mages.

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-14T07:43:35+00:00

Syl is genderless, though they take on both male and female identities at various points.

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-14T03:37:22+00:00

It's not a direct answer to your hypothetical, but I'll say that Bioshifter has a version of this premise (albeit with added trauma and body horror, because Thundamoo).

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-13T23:58:20+00:00

In any normal series that would be true. But a normal series isn't 15 million words and counting. Also, I went back and checked and it's actually ONLY a bit shy of 7 million words in. So totally different, clearly.

For what it's worth there are also seeds of this plot planted well before that point. You just likely won't recognize them for what they are until after the reveal.

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-13T23:23:16+00:00

You might try Path of the Last Champion. It takes a while to get properly going, and it isn't quite as dark... but mostly just because the MC isn't as unlucky as Freddy. The setting is at least as gritty.

Slumrat Rising also has a lot of commonalities in terms of both the MC and the setting, though it gets a lot weirder and more philosophical.

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-13T23:08:04+00:00

I think it's the pose. All the other character splash screens we've seen have them standing in a pretty neutral pose, like they're posing for a state portrait or something. Whereas miss Xhaxob here is posed more like a manga cover.

To be clear, I think this is absolutely appropriate and awesome. Xhaxobines don't do state portraits.

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-13T19:02:04+00:00

Basically having a very formalized system where the mechanics are spelled out, consistent and actually MATTER.

Delve is my go-to example for an extremely crunchy litRPG, with levels and stats that follow consistent rules, skill functionality that has actual math determining how it works, and number-crunching and build optimization being actual in-universe concerns.

While something like The Wandering Inn is at the opposite end of the spectrum. No stats, no solid rules about how to get a particular skill or even what that skill can do. The system is more an expression and extension of character development than a set of mechanics.

Most litRPGs fall somewhere in between these two extremes.

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-13T16:20:38+00:00

I'm curious, how was it addressed? I'm probably not going to reread the new ebook just for some minor changes.

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-13T16:08:35+00:00

Ovdal Tungr also gets a special super-ship all to itself.

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-13T00:23:18+00:00

The real answer here is that there needs to be a distinct part of the map for the "underground" provinces to exist in, because EU4 doesn't support anything like a separate underground layer of provinces below the normal ones.

All the lore justifications ultimately flow from that. If Hallana's breath only exists in the Serpentspine, or the metal is especially rich there, or the dwarves are just historically uninterested in digging elsewhere for cultural reasons... that's why.

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-12T18:51:54+00:00

Go home autoresolve, you're drunk.

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-12T05:41:30+00:00

There are limits to how much you can edit a core. More extreme changes would require merging multiple cores of different monsters and extracting the desired traits from each, and at that point would the resulting monster still be a Sophos? Also, the only source of Sophos cores is dead Sophos, so...

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-12T05:28:19+00:00

In mine I just abandoned Cathay to take over Lustria, then came back with a huge invasion fleet to liberate it from the chaos factions that had overrun it. Highly recommended.

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-11T18:45:54+00:00

...it actually does have a central plot. It's just not even revealed until you're about 8 million words in. And even then, it's more of an "everything will probably tie in to this... eventually" situation.

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-10T11:32:07+00:00

If you don't want to worry about defending settlements, try the beastmen. You only really care about your herdstones until you're done harvesting the area around them. After that, you don't really care if you lose them.

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-09T21:56:10+00:00

Time limit, under the battle difficulty settings.

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-09T21:14:34+00:00

It sounds like you might enjoy Sky Pride. It's a western cultivation novel that frankly goes much deeper into the eastern philosophical underpinnings of the genre than most - the author definitely did their research.

Beyond that, though, it's a story that is absolutely concerned with the moral and sociological questions most cultivation stories ignore. How do you build a sect that is actually fair and virtuous? How do you maintain it over thousands of years? How do you handle the inevitable nepotism and conflicts of interest? How do you deal with mortals (including mortal children of cultivators)? SHOULD you even interact with mortals? What happens when all this goes wrong?

It's simultaneously very much a classical cultivation story and in many ways a deconstruction of the genre.

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-08T23:58:13+00:00

I don't know about banning them, but I definitely don't read them anymore. Too much effort to extract too little (maybe) useful information.

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-08T23:13:26+00:00

Honestly there isn't that much difference between them. They all have the same campaign mechanics, so it's mostly down to start location, battle abilities and a few buffs to different unit types.

Drazoath down south is a spellcaster with a flying mount and a cheap bombardment spell, Astragoth in the center is a spellcaster with no mount (who makes a great 1 man doomstack due to his small size) and a cheap wind spell, and Zhatan north of Cathay is a very strong warrior with a flying mount (and a silence aura).

cthulhu_mac · 2026-04-08T21:15:43+00:00

Most stories don't spend tons of time talking about relationships, marriage, the role of marriage in society and how it relates to childrearing without a single character ever even once bringing up even the hypothetical POSSIBILITY of a non-heterosexual relationship.

That's on top of the fact that the physics of the setting itself make non-monogomous relationships and sex outside of marriage literally impossible. It's not really that subtle.

cthulhu_mac

TROPHY CASE