Bay 12 Games Forum

... I'unno about you, but it's a lot easier to take a full health character a murderin' than it is a unbuffed one, f'me, even with equipment otherwise identical.

... couldn't be arsed to keep checking if this has been posted before, but my playlist reminded me it existed and thus I feel the need to remind all of you it exists.

Play With Me, the only thing I can actually remember Extreme doing. It opens with a guitar solo rendition of part of Mozart's Piano Sonata no. 11. It's fun, heh.

E: Also this, which is a somewhat latin-style remix of Put Your Records On, and irritatingly difficult to find online. Couldn't even hunt up a youtube link... anyway, it's pretty irrepressibly saccharine in a nice R&B way.

As for why things are often technologically stagnant in fantasy settings, it oocrred to me that there's actually a good explanation built into a lot of fantasy roleplaying games quite by accident.

Well, the more explicit explanation is that the planets in question are deathworlds, and every attempt to develop arcanoindustry blows up, gets eaten, and then sinks into a swamp that wasn't there until the entire area went up in a thano-thaumaturgical localized apocalypse. And then the swamp gets up and lays waste to a country or two in a necromantic rampage. People keep trying to advance, and all it gets them is maintaining the status quo because things keep eating the researchers. And the libraries. And the machines. And the surrounding countryside. So they keep having to rebuild the theoretical castle before the swamp decides to stand up and kick it over, then lay down on top of it, smother the lot, and proceed to self-immolate and go on to kill a few tens of thousands of unsuspecting civilians. There's generally no "And the third time, it stayed up!" in these settings, heh.

There's definitely a lot of interesting settings that try the whole integration thing, though. That one that's WWI with dragons, ferex... though trying to remember what it's called, it turns out there's apparently more than one fantasy series that's... basically that. Huh. The Temeraire series, that think I've never read anything from, and... I might have been thinking of Turtledove's Darkness stuff instead, which was a WWII alt-history that was pretty explicitly a re-imaging as to what might happen if there was an arcane revolution instead of an industrial one.

... but yeah, the whole "What would happen" thing depends mostly on what the magical system itself is like. The drawbacks, limitations, and limiting third parties (species that might not want things to get fancy -- the proverbial idea that can't be killed becomes a lot more killable when you have individuals that can burn down the countryside on their own and literally mindwipe anyone they don't kill) all determine exactly what could happen. Definitely wouldn't mind seeing more magitek settings out there, though. Especially ones that are explicitly magic, instead of just unexplained space magic superscience :V

... tell me more? At least insofar as AI goes, I haven't noticed much more trouble vs. them as I have anyone else.

Ah yes, the days of yesterday. Literally yesterday. There's no metaphor, there. There hasn't been a substantial change in how games handle hard mode in my lifetime. More HP and hits harder has always been the default. Change in attack patterns and AI have always been mildly uncommon, but far from unusual. Welcome to the world of the present. It's much like the world of last decade, just generally prettier and with many quality of life improvements.

As for my computer; I have 8gb of RAM on 64bit Windows. Though I did used to play on 32bit Windows with 4gb but I can't say what playing online was like as I never tried it then.

Mm... I'm on a 4 gig ram computer, myself. Pretty sure 64bit. I'm fairly sure my bottleneck is my CPU, actually -- it's something like a dual-core 2 ghz piece of junk (and I don't believe DoW multi-threads). Computer's got the most ram and best video card I've ever had consistent access to (though said video card is still an integrated one, iirc, it's just relatively beefy as those go), but the CPU is kinda' shite.

Can run skirmish, (non-UA) campaign, and so forth, just fine, but apparently the bit of slow-down involved in that also leads to hilarious desync in an online DoW environment :V

Re: The AI, I've noticed that you if press in and encircle them close to their starting base very early (like, start dropping turrets within firing range of their immediate starting zone exits before you hit the first headquarters upgrade), they seem to just kinda' roll over and give up. Still try to get out and whatnot, but compared to what happens if you let them expand it's almost pathetic. One of the hard games we ran, me and mech managed to more or less cut off the Eldar before they could really get going, and it basically took them forever (and probably a half-hour of me being badly desync'd and functionally unable to issue commands ) to start mounting a credible offense. The chaos daemons on the other half of the map got loose, and spent the whole time making a bit of a mess :V

Basically, hyper aggression seems to throw the AI off a bit. Cut 'em off from expansion and resources and they're muuuch less of a threat.

... it's pretty neat that that's come up in three different threads today :V

I'll reiterate what I said in the ameripol thread: About damn time.