Best posts made by Packrat

The new Crusader Kings 2 expansion continues to be mad. Here is my previous ruler over a decade prior to her death, an elderly dragon queen of a tribal society in sub Saharan Africa who, by the time she finally passed away, personally killed over a hundred people in duels or battle.

She also founded a legendary bloodline by going on an expedition to Russia then fighting a series of bad asses to the death because she had run out of worthy foes closer to home, now all of her female line descendants get special bonuses. Unfortunately both of her badass daughters died before she did and her granddaughters were significantly less impressive. Also she became celibate in her 30s having only had three kids. (This did not remove her Lustful trait?).

She was sufficiently murdertastic that her retinue could attack armies outnumbering it then literally kill everyone whilst suffering minimal losses, she also helped out a lot by personally slaughtering enemy commanders in a good proportion of battles.

Sadly not, I basically lost all impetus when my grandfather died over the holidays and have not done any work on the game for a few weeks.

I am trying to get back into it now that the funeral is done but burnt out after only writing a few paragraphs of stuff yesterday.

I have been putting far too many hours into Kenshi, which is a moderately janky but really interesting game which is a kind of quasi RPG sandbox in what I can only describe as a post apocalyptic Samauri-punk setting. It is really brutal to start with but I am now at the point of having eight characters and a house.

Two of the characters mine copper outside of town, research things (occasionally) and cook food, this gives me a steady trickle income.

The other six venture out into the wilderness to explore and loot ruins or fight everything from freakish wildlife to bandits. My biggest haul so far was looting an ancient and mostly ruined library which was defended by a swarm of 'Security Spiders'. Which appeared to be a mass of 30+ small but murderous spiders who, after downing a character, would immediately try to bite off their limbs. Fortunately my main character was a very fast badass by this point with a huge sword that could cripple multiple spiders with each blow and I managed to wear them down without anyone suddenly becoming in need of prosthetics.

On the way back I was attacked by a 'Beak Thing' though which was rather dangerous. According to the wiki 'Beak Things' eat their prey alive and normally come in large groups, I was rather lucky to meet only one and thus be able to kill it without more than moderate injuries.

Edit: Now raiding a mine of the 'Holy Nation', I defeated the guards outside of the fort easily enough and started to free some of their slaves, but now I am being attacked by slaver traders who are trying to steal my unconcious characters as I withdraw from the area. They are gradually wearing me down along with Holy Nation paladin reinforcements but I am leaving a trail of severed limbs in my wake as I withdraw. The Holy Nation troops have been shouting misogynistic slurs at my female characters as well.

As far as I am aware, Custodius has actually been on staff on Kushiel's Debut before, some years ago, but was kicked off after he tried to twist the theme into something else and conduct his usual bullshit? I forget the precise details but do remember him complaining about it elseMU* then popping in and reading the 'We got rid of him, yay!' post on the game.

So I have been working on military units and mass combat some.

The basic idea is that any given benefice holder who cares about such things will likely have between two and five military units, discounting militia or somebody very very rich who spams cheap infantry hordes. Each unit is a discrete formation which is able to meaningfully do War Stuff by itself though varies in size depending upon exactly what it is.

There are only six basic types so far, three grades of infantry (Regular, Elite, Special), with the better troops coming in much smaller numbers and so actually weaker units overall, then Armour, Artillery and Flitters. They have fairly specific roles and so there should not be an optimal choice, it depends on both an individual's resource distribution and their goals.

So are you a rural baroness? You absolutely want to go for lots of regulars, you have plenty of Manpower and are liable to need to actually fight battles. A Guilder and a city mayor? Perhaps you fulfill your feudal obligations to the Duke with a couple of tanks, or have a flight of fighter bombers, relying on arming up your militia to guard the city walls.

Each unit then has a 'Training Level' from 1 to 6 and can pick a Speciality for every point in excess of 2. Specialities could be something like 'Desert Expert' (Better in deserts), 'Ranger' (Better for scouting or raiding) or 'Terror Troops' (Messes up average or lower training foes).

Unit types come with a base training level but you can work to increase it for individual units, mostly through persuading a PC to spend multiple strategic actions working on things. So hiring a badass to come lead/train your troops is seriously helpful. Also units can be given more/better equipment as expensive options, so you might have a unit of Regulars as cavalry, or equip a unit of Specials with powered ceramsteel armour, if you are rich enough.

So moderately complex but each person who does have an army only needs to deal with a few units and they can be recorded as say 'Regulars, Training 2, Mounted' or 'Elites, Training 3, Motorised, Grenadiers Specialisation'. The main idea is that it is not just 'Jill has more troops than Bill and so matters more'. Jill might have a horde of desert cavalry raiders who are super devastating at skirmishing in deserts, Bob might have a bunch of stalwart line infantry and some artillery who are inferior overall but a lot better for sieging a castle or holding a mountain pass.

Jane might then have nothing but a few dozen cyborg space knights in powered armour who are really not a match for either on a battlefield despite costing at least as much but you absolutely do not want disgorging into your palace unexpectedly or boarding your spaceship.

That kind of dynamic is the goal at least, with the plan that just going 'I have three units of regulars and one unit of elite retainers' should be completely valid for anyone who does not want to do anything fancy and, overall, the optimal strategy if you do not have particular goals in mind.

I just tried out the demo for Crying Suns.

Very FTL influenced, the demo is only the 'first sector' but I am deeply impressed by the graphics, atmosphere and general tone. The gameplay probably does need some tweaking but one key thing is that you REALLY want to upgrade your fuel gathering as soon as you have the scrap available.

@mietze said:

*Fading Suns (I so very much want this. Have contemplated trying to start one a few times.)

So on this note, I am working on something, though there is obviously a lot more to do. A teaser though:

On the subject of actual theme stuff and writeups of what would be available to players, here is something covering the '3rd Republic':

The elites of Nestoria and some more informed individuals of the Known Worlds do know some basic facts about the 3rd Republic, but what?

• The ‘Republic’ launched a treacherous and unprovoked attack upon Nestoria about three years ago, slaughtering the Duke of Panticapaeum, most of his family and many senior nobles. Conspiring with rebels and traitors, they seized almost all of the northern continent of Nestoria before the newly crowned Duchess Carolina broke their fleet in orbit, but are too entrenched to root out.

• The 3rd Republic has inferior technology to the guilds of the Known Worlds, outside of a few outliers such as being able to mass manufacture poor quality personal energy shields.

• They are a multi system polity, with several planets, extensive populations and immense wealth.

• They purportedly follow the Universal Church but are heretics who worship technology and embrace democracy, they even laud psychic powers.

• Their army (The Republican Guard) is very well equipped and highly motivated but does not appear enormously competent, Republican troops and officers are awful with the blade yet excellent shots with primitive cybernetic enhancement. They are also cowards who refuse duels yet are prone to fighting to the death.

• This carries through to space, whilst their ship handling and crew quality are superb and they have an awful lot of heavy warships they are technologically inferior. They also shun boarding actions, relying heavily on think machine directed missiles and numerous fighters with excellent pilots.

• They have some kind of hostile contact with the Vuldrok and captured Republican Navy personnel are often veterans of void warfare against them.

• An uncanny number of those taken prisoner by the 3rd Republic then turn traitor following release.

• They conduct active and dangerously successful infiltration and espionage activities, often trying to turn members of the Guilds or minor houses.

• There are definitely people using the name Al-Malik represented amongst the upper echelons of the Republic, though they do not appear to be in charge.

• Areas occupied by the Republic are then ruled by unruly 'Elected Councils' of former serfs who often launch brutal pogroms against those who were loyal to or prosperous under the old order.

Yeah, I mean yes, Crusader Kings 2 is awesome and I have sunk hundreds of hours into it.

But I have also probably sunk hundreds into the DLC given that I buy them all at full price when they release? I should probably compare it more to a 4-5 game series at this point rather than one title.

Seriously, stuff like training by shooting at targets which look like people seem minor enough, but make a huge difference to people's actual willingness to kill. Modern militaries go to huge effort to train and indoctrinate there (along with being all professional) and it makes a huge difference.

Even just a few decades ago it was very different, I mean reading stuff written by say, Vietnam veterans, whilst I was in officer training was enough to make me sort of go 'WTF, this is Wrong, why on earth would you train people like that?'

The farming/grinding scenes is definitely an issue, a serious one in many instances, I have seen people run 5+ scenes a week on a game to harvest the resulting goodies and have each of them a formulaic and fairly brief 'plot' that was basically a shitty fight or something, quickly resolved then also handing out goodies in 'reward' to the people who took part.

To be honest I feel the best option is to just have whoever runs a scene free to get +voted or +praised or whatever especially if those 'rewards' are a moderately limited resource. Arx works pretty well there (worked? I am talking about experienced from a year ago). If you host a party or a tournament or whatever then provided you 'remind' people the +praise command exists by using it for somebody else as things are wrapping up then it generally lead to a fair few people following on giving them to the event runner.

If you want something completely different, I have been trying out Age of Decadence. It is old, it looks awful and it is brutal as hell.

But the game is incredibly deep and can be played in what seems to be at least a half dozen completely different ways. There is a 'big plot' that the character is only one part of and you interact with it in utterly different ways depending upon your skills, background and actions.

The setting is a weird post magitech apocalypse quasi-Rome but frankly I am not 100% sure if there is any magic or if it is all technology. You have legionaries with bronze spears but my singular run through so far I also encountered a what I am pretty sure was a nuclear bomb, a drawn out quest line over a suit of (maybe magical?) powered armour and what I am pretty sure was a god entombed in the bottom of a pyramid full of weird machines that my Lore 0 character did not understand at all. Protected by Roman-Robots.

@bored said in The 100: The Mush:

@GirlCalledBlu

I honestly don't remember the Fifth World stuff too well in terms of which characters were what, only that I had a hard time getting a piece of the plot despite having a character who for all intents and purposes made a lot of sense to be highly involved (one of the oldest PCs, head of minor house responsible for a lot of shipbuilding, denied having any kind of position in the fleet administration and told to 'work toward it' in a vague way despite the guy being in his late 40s or 50s, IE presumably mid career at least). My perception was less of specific staffer malfeasance (although I did remember a lot of eye-rolly very public relationship spectacle stuff) as it being a lot of RP among friends and outsiders just being kind of clueless on what to do at all.

This matches pretty well with my experiences on The Fifth World, I played Alexis, she was a cousin to the royal family and experienced military leader in her 50's but had to be a 'Knight Lieutenant', in command of a few dozen people at most, because apparently player characters were not allowed to have real influence or power. The thing is, that was despite the fact there were plenty of player characters who were the heads of noble houses or ducal heirs with literally thousands of troops and country sized domains under their control.

Obviously people who had ten thousand minions, many of whom were almost as capable as a really focused player character, still had the same number of points for their +sheet and had much more plot involvement as well in general. It just did not seem to make much sense, if one person can be a Count why cannot another person be a General, or the head of Fleet Procurement, or whatever? Not to mention if all senior nobility are PCs/NPCs played as PCs, especially in a feudal system, why should they be just as capable as the person playing a Space Knight with nothing particular going for them apart from their raw ability and PC Aura?

Now in my case I was hardly shut out of plot, Alexis was actually in command of all of the player characters and their part of the fight during the first big battle with the cyborg invader people. She was the royal heir's aunt who remembered them being toddles and they came to her for advise sometimes, etc. Everything still felt very much on rails though and I eventually stopped playing despite otherwise having fun.

@faraday said in Encouraging Proactive Players:

If Driven Dave is going to be discouraged by a bit of negativity, then he's really not that driven after all.

Somebody really, really does not need to be 'that driven' to drive a lot of stuff and be proactively involved though. I am admittedly not in the best mental state right now (or recently) but it only takes 1-2 of the 'right' people giving the wrong vibe to potentially kill my enthusiasm for playing on a game.

One creepy stalker, one person who is ICly in charge of your character starting to complain that your event takes into account X but they think X sucks and so it is unfair for people who think X sucks, etc. At some point things cross over from a fun relaxation diversion to 'I am going to play a computer game this evening or go to the pub instead.'

Do that for a few days then personally I find it hard to log back in again.

I have been Bannerlording some.

Also wow, I was a hell of a lot better at this when the original came out, I can do archery, at close or medium range, but melee combat? Hah! Without a shield I am completely helpless and I can get attacks off in the direction I intend maybe 40% of the time? Then again the AI sometimes goes weird in sieges and lets you stand behind a mass of soldiers chopping them in the head and killing dozens of them, which makes up for my gross incompetence. Occasionally.

I have to admit that my first thought after looking through the website was along the lines of:

'Ohh god, not vaguely medieval Irish, this is going to be insufferable'. It is going to attract the worst typed accents, weird hagiographic interpretations of inherent Irishness, etc.

Edit: Also FS3, with linear character generation but exponential advancement. What are your plans if any to offset making a super specialist in character generation putting you months to years ahead when it comes to skills compared to somebody who is a generalist? Most FS games thus massively favour whomever can just precisely sneak under your invisible permitted limit of min maxing.

@arkandel That is kind of what I am trying to work out, the strategic resources should be things that people want and need and never have enough of. Obviously maintaining military units is one expense, a bishop is a temporal as well as spiritual ruler and has feudal obligations and defense requirements demanding an army, but as a bishop that is probably not your main priority.

Unless you are one of those bishops. Or a Brother Battle.

One thing which always struck me as wrong in Dragon Age was in the first game where you visit... That town, I forget the name, the one where the lord's son was a mage who had lost control and this lead to the entire place being taken over by the undead and the entire population of the (gigantic) castle turned into skeletons and ghosts.

So apparently one child with mage powers losing control could literally slaughter thousands of people and wipe out a major settlement. If mages are this dangerous? Well the arguments for the circle system become a lot more reasonable especially given the state of the circle when you actually get there. If anything it is amazing that humanity has not been literally wiped out due to one untrained mage losing control apparently being able to overwhelm essentially anything.

But the world is also literally full of myriad independent mages who are 1) Not turning everything into a hellscape and 2) Not even particularly more dangerous than a guy with a sword? Not much consistency. It is not as if they remarked upon the lord's son being exceptionally powerful or something which would have been easy enough to write in.

It was very much 'This is why they do this horrible oppression!' then never backed it up in the setting ever again.

Again, the problem with that it gives a very real mechanical advantage to the person who works out where the unwritten limitations are then slips just past them. For that matter it also strongly favours people who write concepts where them starting as super specialists makes sense, teenage prodigies rather than middle aged and well rounded individuals for example.

With 1xp a week, lets compare two people who are not that extreme. The first person takes (Skill) at 8 and (Skill2) at 8, the second person takes (Skill) at 8, (Skill2) at 4 then (Skill3) at 2 and (Skill4) at 2.

It would take the second person 5+6+7+8 or twenty four weeks to raise (Skill2) to 8.

It would take the first person 1+2 plus 1+2 or six weeks to raise (Skill3) and (Skill4) to two each and catch up on the 'well rounded' skills of the second person.

Now if you want to encourage people to play teenage prodigies or similar this works great, but either way it is likely a good idea to issue very public and clear guidelines. You can only have one eight, one seven, two sixes, etc.

EDITED: I messed up the numbers the first time.