Son of Random Stuff

[prettyfly]

Agreed on the espionage, although, the current religion system is certainly satisfactory and diplomacy has been improved a lot. The chief gripe I actually have with Civ 5 is that it feels to slow and spaced; I don't believe I've ever really felt under serious threat from the AI. It could just be that I need to knock up the difficulty a bit, but even at noble difficulty there were times when the AI would military wipe the floor with my ass (although, they were very, very rare and happened in pretty exceptional circumstances where I couldn't see it coming). Even on monarch, that doesn't happen in Civ 5; it takes ages half the time to link up borders with the AI anyway. Fighting a war in the AI's territory is different (ala your D-Day), but a lot of the thrill comes to me from being on the defensive. I still get crushed from time to time in an economic way still, but that isn't really the same.Not to say I don't absolutely love the Civ 5, but Rhyes is much more to my tastes.

[Dwip]

All of what you say is true, though I'm fairly sure that G&K has a couple of bugs/quirks in it, the biggest one being the AI up and deciding to only build a couple of cities, which makes them terrible. They're also worse at early rushes than they were in vanilla Civ 5 - Alex used to hoplite rush my face off, warrior rushes were somewhat credible, and now they're really, really not.I expect we'll see a patch for some of this before long.

[prettyfly]

I Guess the AI must lack the brains as to how to make a 'tall' empire then. Although, considering how bad Bethesda games can be at release, the issues Gods and Kings have are pretty minor.Also, Alex may actually have given me a bad experience or two with early rushes in that past, now that I think about it.

[Dwip]

It's hard to know precisely what's going on. On the one hand, AIs DO seem to prioritize tall vs. wide more now, and for example Darius in that last game built Persepolis giant. It's pretty hard to get Hanging Gardens now, too.On the other hand, it's not uncommon to see some random AI OCCing in the wilderness until the space age for absolutely no reason. If they fail a warrior rush (they always fail) that seems to do this, or maybe they're getting chomped by how super epic barbarians are now. Dunno, but it's a thing.Like you say, though, if that's the worst problem the game has, it's not doing so bad.

[AndalayBay]

So I guess you'd recommend Gods & Kings? It has always taken an update or two for Civ to work all the kinks out.

[Arthmoor]

What is with this game and filling the map over and over with barbarians?!? I've spent more time kicking them out of little holes in places than I have crushing actual enemies in wars. It's massively irritating and no past Civ game has ever been this annoying about it.

[Dwip]

I think G&K is worth your time, yeah. It's still pre-major patch, so grain of salt, but overall the changes are basically positive.Re: barbarians, yeah, they spawn on turn 1 now, and can spawn anywhere in the fog of war. Annoyed the shit out of us, too, at first, though you do adapt (or turn them off). Main thing is you just need to make another dude near the start to protect your initial worker/escort settlers. How I personally deal with it depends on the map, but I'll usually drop 200 gold early on for a warrior or archer, or really quickly build one in my capital. Or, if you're particularly lucky with terrain, your initial warrior can take care of it.Expect to spend some time getting pillaged, though.

[Arthmoor]

I didn't have any problems with keeping them out of the empire, it just gets annoying having to chase after them at all, especially once the game reaches industrial times. Then it just becomes all sorts of stupid, and is even stupider once you realize the AI hasn't grown at all because his one or two cities is surrounded by them. Well, most of the AIs anyway. Rome and Persia did almost as well as I did in containing the threat early on and have empires a bit smaller than mine.It's the same old Civ though, once you've figured out the new stuff, it's pretty much a straight march to some form of victory. After one's first game though, because silly me didn't realize until way late that the "social policy" screen actually handles your form of government too. I got all the way to the modern era as a despotism and fought all my wars with basically the same 6 units getting upgraded through the ages :PAI aggression sure does seem to have been neutered though. This never would have stood with Civ 1. They'd have rolled over me badly in all of the previous titles for making a boner mistake like this.

[Dwip]

Sounds like the AI deciding to 2CC bug holds true over all versions then?What difficulty/map size are you playing on?

[Arthmoor]

2CC bug? Persia and Rome didn't seem to have issues, but everyone else just stunted themselves because of the barbarians. The presence of a bunch of city states may not have helped either.I was using the Tamriel map so I didn't notice how big it said that was, but I fit a whole lot of cities on it and there's still a bunch of empty space even after annexing half the map. On Chieftain level.

[Dwip]

2CC bug == stunted by barbarians. Although that's not the only cause of it, I don't think. It's especially obvious on bigger maps, which it sounds like the Tamriel one is.Chieftain is definitely why you're not getting rolled, and why it's so forgiving.

[Arthmoor]

Yes, well, I didn't want to get rolled when I didn't know anything about the new stuff. 90% of it is straight up Civ, but the social policy thing threw me. Civ 4 would not have forgiven such a mistake.

[Arthmoor]

To check for updates you must first install an update for Windows Update.

Recursion, Windows style.

[AndalayBay]

We've got a guy who works for Microsoft helping us with Gecko...

[Arthmoor]

So. Maybe someone can explain this. When you post the word "piss" on Steam's discussion forums it gets filtered to "jarate". The hell?

[AndalayBay]

Somebody having fun with the bad word filter?

[Arthmoor]

Lancelor's new KOTN mod is out. Looks like it's time to fire up the old Oblivion install again!

[AndalayBay]

And then follow that up with the new DBC! We did rewrite it and I think it would satisfy most of your beefs with the original version. We were really fortunate to get some professional input.I do like how Lanceor has a nod to evil characters, which I thought was an interesting option. I guess it's kind of like we did.

[Arthmoor]

Oh Oblivion, your crashes remind one of why we stopped playing you.

[AndalayBay]

And the st-st-stutter. Despite my problems with Skyrim, it's much smoother.

[Ysne58]

I did help test KOTN-R. I'm still hoping to get to Awakening in the near future.

[Hana]

Oh Oblivion' date=' your crashes remind one of why we stopped playing you.[/quote']Funny, I say the same thing about Skyrim. Random crashes, FTW.I also got a sneak peak beta of KOTN:R. Fascinating. I've learned more lore playing this than anything else. Lanceor is a great storyteller.

[Arthmoor]

Wow. Had I paid for this game I'd be angrily demanding a refund. How the fuck did Two Worlds 2 ever get past the QA department when the ending movie sequence doesn't even play? Which you can't even get to work with a reload right before it because some fucknut decided it would be great fun to create the world's worst end game battle of all time. This game sucks SO BAD that it isn't even worthy of posting a blog review for it.

[AndalayBay]

After suffering through Two Worlds, I had already decided that there was no way on this planet that I was going to waste a cent on TW 2.

[Arthmoor]

The first one was a good game, I enjoyed it a lot. The sequel just plain sucks and the only reason I kept at it was to see the end of what little story there was. If it hadn't been for that, there would have been no point at all. The whole thing was just mindless killing and a plot so linear it would make a straight edge jealous.Rather glad that they fucked up their shipments to the US at this point because someone's head would have rolled. And this is AFTER the damn thing was supposed to have been patched.Oh, and good lord, one could see every single suspicious moment with NPCs coming a mile away with the sole exception of what they did with Gandohar. THAT I didn't see coming.Well, actually, the one thing that kept me from simply purging it from my account was a bug. A favorable one at that. Something glitches my HP into the millions, which was really the only reason I was able to get to the ending anyway. When you've got weapons that do 1,000 points of damage per hit and it takes dozens of hits to kill things and you're gulping 5,000hp healing potions like water, something is VERY wrong with your game.It felt like an MMO with the ridiculousness of it all.