Bay 12 Games Forum

I keep forgetting about the 867 start date and just how old the Ruriks are. The rota system does make sense for the 1066 "official" start date and would be nice to see. Right now the Rurikovich land blobs under a single leader too much.

A wee bit off topic but anyway ...

I'm going to say that it's near impossible to make a really meaningful war game out of a FPS. Don't get me wrong I love FPS and think you can do a lot out of them but I just don't think you can make it work such subject matter.

First of all the got the massive skill gaps of FPS players which can really affect the mechanics and break immersion. A good example of this would be Telltale's Walking Dead and (early) Far Cry 3. In both of these games you're meant to be an average person with no skills in weaponry, however when a decent shooter player performs the parts that involve shooting the characters suddenly become walking torrents of death. The only way to compensate for this is to weaken shooter gameplay by artificially inflating shooting difficulty and spawning less enemies. Which, in my opinion, defeats the purpose of making it a FPS in the first place.

I would personally say that FPS tend to heavily desensitise the player to violence in the gameworld. Shooting is satisfying and largely rewarding. It would be extremely hard to come up with a mechanic that's not annoying and punishing to make sure that shooter player doesn't feel that way.

It seems like something that would be covered better by some sort of "survival-adventure" based around a small tightly knit group of soldiers who slowly develop stronger relationships. It's main "gimmick" could be the squad mates or the player character(s) dying in completely inane and unsatisfying ways.

Now I know you're all going to bring up Spec Ops: The Line as an example of a shooter handling war themes well. I won't disagree with that. However Spec Ops was also a deconstruction of the modern shooter as well. To try and make a game purely about warfare and not about the difference between games' interpretation of warfare and real terrible warfare is something I just can't see being done by a FPS.

WW2 games where there is no Axis campaign

I think it's a failure of history that all Germans during WWII are all considered amoral monsters. There's a big difference between the basic Wehrmacht and the SS Death Heads. Yes there were atrocities committed by both sides but the fact that the brunt of the german army (and all armies at the time) were barely trained conscripts forced into service is something a lot of people fail to consider.
Note that I'm not justifying any action taken by Nazi forces during WWII rather that there were people serving in the army and not just monsters.

Doesn't Rurikovich lands use seniority? Ideally they should have a Rota System but CKII can't model that yet. 
Not sure how you'd balance a Rota using CK2 mechanics, seems to have way too many benefits and almost no negatives.

I can't stand C being crouch. Although it's a dying art I have no idea how one would crouch jump with C. My thumb is for jumping my pinky is for crouching.

Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate have been fully redone in NWN 2 which might tempt some people to get it. I much prefer the original games and the remakes just don't feel as good with the 3.5 ruleset. 3D environments are pretty though.

Games that fuck around with setting/themes of the source material.
"Enslaved: Odyssey to the West" which was based off the far more interesting Chinese book called "Journey to the West" was a massive culprit of this. Water down with it's setting and contents "Americanised" to appeal to marketers who believe you can only sell Americans to other Americans.

The latest example of this that really got my blood boiling was the announcement that the new Mad Max game won't take place in Australia. Fuck. That. Shit. To top all of that of the protagonist now has the mandatory bland American gravel growl now which is so boringly placed in every AAA game. I suddenly have no interested in Not-Mad Max: Generic Post-Apocalyptic Setting #43.

If I was designing the Old Gods expansions I would have made a High King system for pagans. While it's not 100% historically accurate it would help to better model the decentralisation of pagan states and to make it feel more tribal than feudal.
Basically there is a king or emperor title known as the High King which takes a certain traits, stats and prestige/piety to create. When a ruler holds this title only then are they allowed the subjugation cb against anyone in the de jure. The title can be usurped by anyone who has the necessary prerequisites and can either use a duel event chain or war to claim it. 
If there is no one who can hold the title it is destroyed and all vassals return to being independent until someone worthy steps up to eb the next high king.

I would also add concepts of blood allegiances and blood enemies. Dynasties can declare a small amount of blood allegiances on other dynasties sharing the same faith. This gives a massive relation bonus, some events and a call to arms to any war started by either party without the need for marriages.
Blood enemies can be declared on dynasties sharing the same faith and work pretty much the opposite of blood allegiances giving you cbs against the dynasty and a whole range of nasty things you can do to each other plus raiding.
Blood allegiances and blood enemies can create relationship triangles between dynasties as if two of your blood allies are blood enemies with each other a decision must be made who to support resulting in a break of the allegiance for one with a massive relationship hit.
This will make managing a large vassal-base as a pagan quite hard as one has to manage both blood enemies and allegiances while also keeping in mind the various triangles they form. This will keep pagans extremely volatile with an extreme amount of drama and infighting as was historically the case.

I'm firmly in the Project Balance camp and can no longer play without it.
I do reccomend Culture and Portrait Revamp for both a PB or a vanilla game. It no longer adds any new cultures (reserved for VIET mod instead) and rather works to make sure the graphics are so much better as mikefictiti0us pointed out. It gets rid of the "Arab portraits everywhere" problem of the base game. You will need all the portrait DLC for it to really shine however.