Bay 12 Games Forum

Yeah I get the occasional siege events killing men. But I'll lose like 500 men from an event firing and then suddenly whatever is happening to me kicks in and I start losing rapidly and within a month another 3000 men will be gone. Sometimes I can raid whole countries with a stack of raider troops, other times this kicks in and I lose all my guys at one county.

Speaking on a completely different topic... Holy crap man, way of life is ridiculous with the seducing. My initial char went through 6 wives (none of which were lustful) who became "the unfaithful" and I divorced within 15 years. Then he dies and his daughter (the only child his wives had that wasn't someone else's bastard) becomes queen, and I start getting bombarded with like 4-5 indecent proposals a month with every count and duke in the realm trying to bed the queen. And they would not give up, it went on for years before I just quit the game in frustration of the popup every week (even when I'm trying to fight a war and the guy who is trying to seduce is supposed to be leading troops). Even her archbishop was trying to get it on with her. There should be some recourse to this mess, I should be able to imprison them all. Or at least an option to demand that they end their advances, similar to the "End Plot" demand thing. The rest of way of life is pretty interesting, but this part is ridiculous. And this is already the "toned down" version where they "fixed" it. I can't imagine how bad it was before.

Tribal? Could be zealots/warrior fleeing because you're not at war?

Nope, all the men were from my own demesne.

Yeah, I know how to raid effectively. And fully sieging provinces is actually quite lucrative when you hit the ones that are like one castle and a bunch of towns, each town can yield 100+ gold if they're built up. Brugge gave me 700 gold for looting it. I stacked up my guys on it because they had an army of 3000 sitting around. Thankfully that army went off to fight someone else before my army dwindled down to practically nothing or it would have got me, heh.

My issue is mysterious loss of troops - with no event or anything going on to explain it. It's like a battle is occurring without it showing any battle (or any enemy losses). Losing troops as if I'm assaulting on the siege instead of waiting it out. It even happens when I don't wait out the siege. Splitting an army of 7000 up into 7 groups of 1000 and just looting the bit of free gold on different provinces just as quickly makes my men dwindle down to a few thousand even when I don't win any sieges. It's some kind of weird bug. It doesn't occur in every game either, earlier in this same game I was successfully raiding with 3000 men and returning with 500 gold and 2500 or so men. Now with the bug I send out 7500 men and get back 1800 or less after 500 gold. Guess I should post about it on the paradox forums.

Progression on a single server feels very natural and fun.  XP gain only becomes annoying if you find yourself moving between servers and starting fresh a lot. Then you get to where you're just trying to get enough XP to make such and such that you had before. And even then it's not really tedious, especially with a few friends. You can level up quickly just by building up a base since you all share xp on crafting too. I gained a few levels on an official server just helping some guys build a big wooden house, joined their tribe and all of us together were out deforesting the area and crafting walls and foundations and ceilings and such as we went, then heading back and putting them all in place before going out and gathering more.

Taming also isn't bad if you do it while crafting. I tamed a trike (took about 40 mins I think) while building a house. I just knocked him out in the woods and deforested the area around him as I went, making trips to where I wanted the house planted and back to him as needed. As long as you get them good and sleepy you can leave them for a few minutes to do other stuff.

You can do cool stuff when you get pillars. Placing them is a bit tricky now, but I was able to make a nice cliffside base on the northwestern cliffs - with a ladder to the water and housing up on the top with irrigated farms. Diving down in that area is ridiculously dangerous though, and it's deep - the area is usually patrolled by a dozen or so megalodons. I dove one time when some trikes and stegos and stuff had fell off and were keeping them busy, and I saw a bunch of oil and pearls on the bottom. But I drowned before I even reached bottom, let alone got back up. Would need a tamed megalodon to even have a chance to get down there.

I took the opportunity to get some ck2 DLC I didn't have at 75% off, and Way of Life at 50% off. Now I have pretty much everything for ck2 for when I next decide to play it, haha.

This monster game is nuts. I have just been joining for the cards and not really paying attention, but apparently the random game I got assigned to this time has a bunch of people actively playing and/or cheating in it. It's at level 618,830 and quickly climbing. It shot past 600 more levels while I was typing this. Not quite sure what the point is though, lol. I didn't get any extra cards for going up to ludicrous levels.

Few random tips from playing all this time, most of which I haven't heard anyone else mention:

Use a bedroll as a poor man's GPS. Plop it down, E on it to open quick travel map, see where you are, cancel, pick it back up. Bam, no longer lost.

Use the big obelisks as a directional compass. Green is on SW corner, red is on NW on the big mountain, and blue is about midway on the east side near the river crossing. Combining the usage of a bedroll to see where you are and looking to see where the obelisks are you can get anywhere without becoming lost.

Use the blood extraction syringe on yourself to get blood bags (or put in inv on sleeping people to take them from them, just note that it takes 25 health each use if you don't want to kill them). The blood bags can later be used to restore 20 health. So if you're sitting in a safe area and collecting wood or whatever you can be collecting blood bags from yourself, which for some reason don't ever spoil. And later you can use them while out hunting or pvping. I had 10 blood bags on me when some guy started shooting me with a rifle, thanks to the blood bags I was able to sprint back to him and stab him to death with my spear. Right now there isn't even a cooldown on them, so unless you drop dead in one hit you can survive indefinitely with enough of them.

If you're sick of gathering materials and making spears, the stone hatchet is actually good enough to kill most stuff (better than the pick). I always just use my stone axe to kill trikes and such (stay behind them and keep moving to avoid them turning and hitting you) and if I even make spears I save them for emergencies like a player or predator attack (or big swarm of dilos). Once you have metal, the metal hatchet is surprisingly good. Almost as good if not as good as a pike. Easy to take down argentavis and mammoths and such with one - and way lighter.

Tame a trike or stego when you can, they make gathering narco berries far easier.

Power level yourself enough to get wooden walls asap when starting on a new server, as anyone can and will break into thatch. A decently well hidden wood house will usually be left alone for weeks or more, while a thatch house on the beach will get wrecked over night usually.

That's the thing with an import allowed server, people can just import cheated chars and dinos. I've had less random pks on official servers than there.

So far I still haven't had any of my beds destroyed on the official one. And I have like 8 set up across the map, a few even without walls.

This is the way I see it: If you are playing on a server that doesn't allow imports, and get up to level 25 (the level required to build your own metal tools and start destroying buildings with them) or spend several hours taming a dinosaur that can destroy a building and finding a saddle for it (also requires some levels, not sure lowest level a dino can kill wooden buildings) then you have a decent bit of time invested on that server. At that point you want to keep playing that character, as he's over the initial difficult bit and can now build his own semi-secure houses and make nice things for himself.

On the other hand, if you just cheated a high level char into the server, with your high level dino mount (which doesn't even need a saddle if it's cheat tamed), you don't have much to lose.

In which case do you think someone is more likely to be a dick and go around destroying buildings and killing people, potentially making lots of enemies and even maybe getting banned if the server owner doesn't like it?


Now on pvp servers there will be raiders, but they will also have a base of their own. Which means if they raid too much you can probably get together some other folks also raided and raid them back. You don't see the people with nothing to their name just roaming around on a trex smashing buildings because they can - someone who can tame a trex generally has a base and a lot of time invested on that server. I actually saw this play out on the server I'm on (official 343). People started talking about getting raided by this one group, and one of them was like "Well why don't we raid them? I know where their base is. Anyone have c4?" Then they organized to talk over steam instead of in game. A few hours later I see someone else remark "Holy shit, those ____ guys got raided bad. Their base is in shambles."


-edit- In other news, the 175 patch notes look nice. I especially like the tribe governance thing, sounds like you might be able to organize it where people keep individual property and also have tribe property (which would be awesome for loose knit tribes like a b12 group). Crops grow twice as fast and resources respawn faster too.

Been trying to get in to make Folly leader, but server has been full. Had better luck getting in the official servers lol.

Guess I'll do it Monday when I can actually log in.

Oh, I got in and I'm not leader. Was I ever? I'm not sure.