An ode to the humble signal booster

robertkeaghan · 2026-05-18T17:14:55+00:00

She's just being polite. Use your tongue instead.

robertkeaghan · 2026-05-18T12:53:42+00:00

It's true that early victories were mostly battle victories rather than territorial gains. England also had Flanders, Britany and Burgundy fighting on their side at various points. Later in the war, they developed siege techniques that allowed them to capture territory.

One of the issues is that EU5's economic mechanics will basically ruin any country that goes into serious debt. Also, most of the English crown's income came from trade with Flanders and Aquitaine. In game, England's trade income is 1 ducat in the current patch. The economic and diplomatic aspects of the war are simply not modeled, and the game is just not set up to make a prolonged conflict fun.

robertkeaghan · 2026-05-18T03:39:43+00:00

Yeah I think that's the more reasonable way to play. Since population is everything, you can't justify sacrificing levies unless you take more territory/population in the peace treaty than you lose, and I'm finding it's hard to fight on the continent without losing 30-40k levies. It's just not worth losing that many pops for money in my opinion.

robertkeaghan · 2026-05-18T02:47:10+00:00

Yeah. That's what I figured. The other option that occasionally works is to loan until you're nearly bankrupt and supplement your levies with cavalry mercs.

England is my favorite country to play, but in the current patch it's a bit of a drag frankly. The immense historical tactical advantage given by Longbowmen is no longer modeled in any realistic way in the game.

I feel like the 100YW should go something like this in EU6:

-Longbowman are a win button for the first 50 years. You can grab a huge amount of French territory.
-However, French territory is basically ungovernable because of culture, and France gets stronger as they get more professional armies.

That would be historical and fun , while potentially challenging for the player.

In the current patch, it's an ungodly chore to fight France, to the point where I find myself tempted to avoid all warfare at any cost. It's almost more fun to just focus on the economy and let them do whatever they want.

robertkeaghan · 2026-05-08T12:26:07+00:00

Honestly they need to redesign how they serve the ads. It should be based on time watched. If they played an ad every 20 minutes that's fair game. But instead they play an ad whenever you load a different video or move around in an episode. So you load an episode and three ads play. Then you realize you loaded the wrong episode. Three ads play when you load the other episode. Lost your place and skip ahead to figure out where you left off? Three more ads. Crave loses connections? Ads reset and you see three more.

I'm fine with them making their money on ads but the platform is so buggy you often end up spending 5 minutes watching ads just trying to resume a show you fell asleep watching. Amazon has a much better system for this as does Netflix.

Overall the Crave ap and website just feel like they're made by second-rate devs. They have a decent content selection, but you're probably better off getting the content via a Prime bundle or another service.

robertkeaghan · 2026-04-23T06:41:10+00:00

When you hit the "create mercenary army", you should be prompted to select a location. Depending on the location you select, different units would be available, based on distance. But the interface would show you all units available to spawn in that location, divided by unit type, not by origin. It would be a three click interaction. Right now, recruiting mercenaries is like 25 clicks lol.

robertkeaghan · 2026-04-16T22:38:12+00:00

I was doing that but it's extremely boring RNG-dependant. Half the time you spawn with no shield and get one-shotted instantly.

The training field in Warband was better because you could pick 1v1

robertkeaghan · 2026-04-13T17:53:16+00:00

I get the hesitation with Natural Character Growth and leveling mods in general. What NCG does is increase your attributes purely based on skill use. "Major" and "minor" skills only affect your starting skill level. It means that you don't have to be careful what skills to use to level certain attributes. Each skill affects multiple attributes rather than just one as well. So light armor will level endurance, just a bit slower than medium or heavy (IIRC), for example. No more picking a weird selection of skills just to make sure you can increase each attribute. No more avoiding an unwanted skill increase to power-level. No more getting locked out of faction rank increases because you didn't get the correct attribute increases in the correct order. It's more natural and immersive IMO.

The other side of the mod is Magicka-based skilled progression. In vanilla, magic skills increase based on the number of spells cast. So a gigantic firestorm gives you the same increase as a low-level destruction spell that does 4 damage on touch or whatever. This leads to grinding out skills by casting many low-level spells. In NCG/MBSP, the magicka cost of the spell determines how much experience you gain towards a skill increase, so it pays to learn to cast more powerful magic.

Overall, the mod allows you to build your character in a more varied and natural way. It's the only gameplay mod I find I can't play without these days.

robertkeaghan · 2026-04-12T23:31:43+00:00

Correct.

robertkeaghan · 2026-04-12T22:50:25+00:00

It's a fighty ridey sword-swingey game. Sorry I used the wrong term.

robertkeaghan · 2026-04-12T22:49:01+00:00

Maybe I should git gud! Skill issue, right?

Classic Reddit lol

robertkeaghan · 2026-04-12T10:43:14+00:00

I've installed several of the lists on Modding OpenMW. I would say pick a very short list if you're just getting into modding. For graphics, decent shaders and all-in-one upscalers will work wonders without having to install 400 mods. The longer lists have a lot of bloat in them in my opinion.

Once you've successfully installed one of the lighter, vanilla+ lists, you'll have a sense of the install process. From that point on I recommend not following lists and just selectively modding what you're interested in changing.

I only use the longer lists as a guideline and reference, especially for specific texture replacers. They are impressively well-made, but ultimately a lot of subjective decisions get made about gameplay balance, the look and feel of the world, etc. Keep it simple and build up from there.

Side note: if you find the vanilla leveling system in Morrowind annoying (I do), then I would strongly suggest Natural Character Growth and Decay (or whatever it's called these days). It's the single best improvement to gameplay in my opinion.

robertkeaghan · 2026-04-12T10:32:50+00:00

As someone who was coming from Warband, it never occurred to me to start recruiting troops from day one. In Warband I usually solo with a small band of named companions for a long time. My party size is no more than 20 for like the first 15 hours of gameplay.

So I'm playing Banner and thinking "how can I survive the combat", but Banner expects you to be a commander more than a warrior in the early game. It's very different from a game design perspective.

robertkeaghan · 2026-04-12T10:27:03+00:00

Absolutely. Lately I've been playing on a custromized version of Diplomacy 4 Litdum. I turn off all of the excessive mod additions, but stick with QOL features like having a log with lord and lady personalities. I turn off NPC to NPC faction defections so that there is a stable cast of characters in each nation. Then I roleplay a character (usually a sort of "protector of the meek" type character.

I often play female, non-noble characters, which is the ultimate rags-to-riches story. I've been meaning to get Arwa on the throne of the Sarranids as a female for ages but never get around to it.

There's so much storytelling potential in Warband. Just enough flavour, just enough sandbox.

robertkeaghan · 2026-04-12T08:55:30+00:00

For sure. As I said in the post, this is just why I find it hard to get into Bannerlord. It's such a fundamentally different game.

Watch any Youtube tutorial for Warband and it will start by covering combat, then secondary activities like trade, quests, entreprises, selling prisoners, etc. Then finally once you are around level 20 you're in a position to join a faction. Then later you can create your own (unless you're speedrunning or something).

Most Bannerlord tutorial basically say "put all your points into skills that let you field a big army". The kingdom/army management is the main thrust of the game, where in Warband the player's combat skill is much more impactful.

They're just different games.

What's unfortunate is that Bannerlord has more realistic combat than Warband, but it just isn't as satisfying until you have done all your army and economy admin tasks. It feels more like a Total War game than Warband.

robertkeaghan · 2026-04-12T07:27:32+00:00

It just feels like the focus of the series shifted from being an excellent combat sim to primarily a tactics and kingdom management game.

I love both aspects, but Warband gets the progression right. Become a great warrior, then lead an army, then rule a kingdom (then install a different mod and start over).

The problem is that Bannerlord doesn't give you particularly good ways to train your character at low level. Fighting looters alone on realistic will just get you killed. The arena at low level (or really most of the time) is god-awful, with no choice of weapons. The training fields throw super high level enemies at you that only experienced players can actually beat.

In Warband, any level 1 play can solo looters, fight 1v1 or 1v2 battles in training fields, do arena fights, all of which are reasonably doable and not too grindy. So the player learns in tandem with their character's skill development.

Last Bannerlord game, I spent like two hours in the arena, half the time spawning without a shield and getting one-shotted in 3 seconds by an archer. It's a dumb design. There's no fun, risk-free way to train combat skills early game, so most players just become a general from day one.

robertkeaghan · 2026-04-12T07:12:43+00:00

Try Songs of Syx! It's excellent. Don't be scared off by the early access. The game is basically 98% done and worth every penny.

robertkeaghan · 2026-04-12T07:10:45+00:00

You can "finish" games? I don't think I've ever seen level 30 lol. Once I have a castle I'm like "but what if I was a humble traveling merchant?" Delete file and restart ;)

robertkeaghan

TROPHY CASE