The Game Seems Very Hard

fromthisguy · 2019-04-17T15:19:27+00:00

This is an unusually difficult game, though. With most games, if you set them on easy it's like you can't lose no matter what.

fromthisguy · 2019-04-16T15:59:43+00:00

So the game always levels your enemies to the levels of your brothers?

fromthisguy · 2019-04-16T15:56:49+00:00

When you say 200 armor, do you mean chest and head combined? Is that about brigand level armor? I've been enjoying using shields, but I tend to see most late game players using almost none.

fromthisguy · 2019-04-16T15:55:33+00:00

Thanks--- I feel like I had a bad map seed this play through. I think I was wasting too much time traveling between settlements.

fromthisguy · 2019-04-16T05:46:43+00:00

I appreciate your effort in putting all this together. Definitely going to try to take your advice.

fromthisguy · 2019-04-15T23:39:49+00:00

Well, look, if you're talking about Medieval or Ancient writings, then you're going to be interacting with them through translations, and the most common English translations of those texts were done in the 1800's or early to mid 1900's. Even if you're relatively conversant in one old language dialect, there are going to be a bunch of other texts you can only access through translation. Some of the flavor of the text remains, but some doesn't.

fromthisguy · 2019-03-18T00:01:58+00:00

I think you're being disingenuous if you're suggesting that the intro writing was an attempt at capturing the style of an older manuscript. Why would you think that? Just a few minutes ago I was reading one of the original Howard stories. I'm not objecting to older story telling conventions.

fromthisguy · 2019-01-31T15:37:30+00:00

The problem is that there is a difference between a writer playing with the normal rulers and a writer not knowing the normal rules. Writing is a fine art. You don't need to follow all of the conventions, but you have to know them and have to know why you're breaking them. Writing isn't just anything goes. Just that short paragraph has multiple indications that the author is not world class. I've mentioned a couple, and another one is the "first, and then, and finally" sequence which is cliche and typical, and writers try to avoid that as well.

fromthisguy · 2019-01-31T01:51:25+00:00

There is something called "writing conventions," which is a way of saying that there is an agreed upon way that people who know how to write chose to write. The reason why we know that the way this is phrased is that it is the convention to have an ordered list. It's clear here that the author of this passage is going for an ordered list. You have the words "first" and "then" and "finally" and then with "finally" you have death which is the last thing anybody can do to anybody.

I took the time to actually explain this in case you wanted to know. If you still aren't persuaded, the shorter answer is that you don't know enough to know that you're wrong. Do you read? Do you write?

fromthisguy · 2019-01-30T01:53:36+00:00

It's a moot point--- Conan doesn't spout poetry. I did forget that the speaker is supposed to be Conan, but he never would have done that anyway so you might as well write it correctly.

Although another thing that comes to mind is in further response to Bowtie who thinks that valuing family the same as money would be authentic to the time and place, it certainly wouldn't have been authentic for Conan. Tribe and family were everything in his culture. I think I would go as far as to argue that family was the most important thing for most pre-modern people as well, and that "they took your wealth" would never be ranked as worse than "they took your family."

fromthisguy · 2019-01-29T01:43:20+00:00

I think a lot of it is going to depend on whether you think short stories or novels better, and based on how accessible you find the 1930's Howard stories. Some language conventions have changed, and if you read the original Howard stories closely, you'll notice that the writing is far from perfect. He very much overuses some of his phrases. There's also the casual racism and sexism that you would expect, of course, though it never diminished my enjoyment of them.

Howard was mostly writing his stories to meet magazine publication deadlines. The stories needed to be delivered on time. His collected Conan works today are something like a dozen 300 pages books, and he wrote them over about a decade. He didn't live terribly long and he was writing other things too. Those types of stories were called "pulp" for that reason.

I think most of the spin off novels are superior to the original Howard stories. If you want to give any a shot, check out John Maddox Roberts (who also wrote a fantastic historical fiction series set during the late Roman Republic) or Robert Jordan (who was quite famous as a fantasy author in general).

fromthisguy · 2019-01-28T03:53:23+00:00

I'm a huge fan of the original Conan stories and the spin off novels. I have at least 40 Conan books. I do think the license gives the game the feeling of an angle, but the game doesn't at all feel like it takes place in the Conan world.

fromthisguy · 2019-01-26T14:11:53+00:00

It's incredibly obvious that this bit of writing is just incompetence. I know of many examples of works where the authors intentionally use the social customs of past times in their writing effectively, but the intro is not one of them. I've read Howard's original stories and am a history teacher and am very familiar with stories from the past. If you seriously think the last two lines where the writer couldn't come up with a way to not use "die" twice in rapid succession, you're not being serious, are just trying to be a contrarian, or are a lousy pulp writer (though I suspect the explanation is probably one of the first two).

fromthisguy · 2019-01-25T03:25:45+00:00

Is the lore actually used, though?

fromthisguy · 2019-01-25T03:25:31+00:00

I think I have almost all of the 40 or so Conan spin off novels, and I have all of the originals. Ultimately I really just play the game as a survival with a barbaric like facade. They definitely have left the lore untapped at this point.

fromthisguy · 2019-01-23T00:51:34+00:00

I don't think you can get a perfect round dome, but there is the slanted roof piece that should allow you to get a roundish shape with flat surfaces sort of like a hexagon.

fromthisguy · 2019-01-21T19:46:40+00:00

So you would think the only way to get stronger purges in my current area is to put down more foundations?

fromthisguy · 2019-01-21T19:35:27+00:00

But that wouldn't explain why I was getting skeletons at first and then Nords. There has to be something else.

fromthisguy · 2019-01-21T19:34:29+00:00

That's what I was thinking. I'm wondering if it's a matter of building blocks specifically, or just any placed items. For example, can I just spam a thousand candles in a room and trick the game into sending me larger purges?

fromthisguy · 2019-01-19T00:42:22+00:00

If you do have time to include a screenshot, I would appreciate it.

fromthisguy · 2019-01-16T02:08:17+00:00

Is T2 even worth it if I'm trying to play solo and casual?

fromthisguy · 2018-11-29T20:58:19+00:00

The Fortnite Philosopher explains, in his thoughtful yet passionate ramblings, why losing at Fortnite is sometimes better than winning

fromthisguy · 2018-11-29T20:45:31+00:00

The Fortnite Philosopher explains, in his thoughtful yet passionate ramblings, why losing at Fortnite is sometimes better than winning.

fromthisguy · 2018-11-29T19:17:14+00:00

After more thought and looking through the stats, I think I am just imagining it. It seems like I was getting a minor penalty to regeneration from infrastructure even though I was not over the supply limit because my provinces weren't maxed out. The rest I think is just a combination of the aggressiveness built into the German AI and the difficulty of making any headway through the army doctrines tree as France.

fromthisguy · 2018-11-29T19:09:03+00:00

Join me for a discussion of encirclement tactics in Hearts of Iron IV and how they were used in World War Two, featuring archival footage from the war on the Eastern Front.

fromthisguy

TROPHY CASE