What Video Games Have You Been Playing, Part 10: Or; A Shameful Display!

[Phrossack]

Hey, @Lexicus and anyone else who saw this in passing.

It does produce the 'if you want to expand you have to take the land from the "barbarians" effect.' I thought I had a pretty good start because the river I founded my capital on ran four tiles down to the sea and I managed to found a second city at the mouth of the river uncontested.

Unfortunately I took a wrong turn on the research path. I started as Napoleon (random) so had farming and the wheel. Paris had immediate access to hilltop pigs and grassland cows so I went with AH first. That worked out well as my immediate build worker had me booming out population and the settler for my port really quick. I also had a barren hilltop that I thought would be metal so I ran mining-BW-IW...and it wasn't. That was the wrong turn. I popped out another settler and built a city three tiles from Paris next to a Carthaginian copper mine hoping to flip it and frantically researched hunting-archery, but about the time my first archer appeared in Paris a neighboring Suleiman, who did have metal, marched in and started carving through my warriors like butter.

So I peaked at three cities controlling a total of thirty tiles, plus two sea tiles. The 'must expand by taking land from barbarians' definitely worked, except as it turned out I was the barbarians.

What mod lets you have so many civs at once? I don't think there even are fifty civs in base BtS.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Ouch. What difficulty was this on?

Monarch, and with better AI monarch is a bit more...monarch. I didn't think to change it. I think I'd have been okay if I had landed some metal, and I also would have been okay if I had beelined archery. I didn't really have anything useful to build so I boomed out more than a dozen warriors. If most of them had been archers I would probably have been too hard for the Ottomans to chew, even with their spears and axes. They only had a stack of five units. It definitely presents an entirely different game.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

What mod lets you have so many civs at once? I don't think there even are fifty civs in base BtS.

There's a mod floating about that is cleverly called 50 civ mod. All it is is a slight change in the DLL to change the limit, AFAIK. Shoutout to @Lemon Merchant who merged that into the BetterBat AI DLL for me at some point. Since then there has been a fifty civ modded DLL included in BetterBat AI as a general rule (I think). If you have BAT look in the folder for a RAR compressed file, change the name on the main DLL to backup, and decompress the compressed replacement file. Easy peasy.

That said, there are 52 leaders in BTS, but if you let them be randomly assigned you get duplicates. Even if you manually assign them you have to accept that there will be Roosevelt Americans, Washington Americans, and Lincoln Americans, etc.

 

[Lexicus]

I should probably install BAT and BUG now I think on it...

 

[Phrossack]

I've never even heard of BAT, but I always did stubbornly resist mods...I should really install some more, but FfH2 and FF have been crashing lately.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I should probably install BAT and BUG now I think on it...

I've never even heard of BAT, but I always did stubbornly resist mods...I should really install some more, but FfH2 and FF have been crashing lately.

BAT and BUG are, in my opinion, indispensable. Don't change the game play, just make the game way better. I moved on to BetterBat AI, which is an improved AI mod merged into BAT, and I got into a huge map more civs kick so got that merged in as well. I don't think that as far as playing the game goes it is really any different than vanilla. It's a lot easier to access information (BUG) but I can't access anything that I couldn't in vanilla if I dug through the screens. I get to play with more civs on the map than the vanilla limit, if I want to, but I don't have to (50 civ). The AI plays a little smarter game, I suppose. It's pretty transparent, but I know that when I added Better AI I had to drop down a difficulty level.

And BAT...I just wouldn't play without BAT. "Hey, why do my swordsmen look just like their swordsmen? And their swordsmen? And their swordsmen? Shouldn't Greek Swordsmen look different than Spanish Swordsmen? WTH? Why does Shaka's Zulu cottage look just like an Egyptian cottage?" It doesn't really seem like it should be important, but once I got used to it trying to play without it just drives me immediately nuts.

BAT is probably responsible for me not being permanently banned from CFC. They recruited what might be the only person here who I would never spout off at as a moderator and she keeps me in check.

As to stability, I never have any crashing problems, though there is one added map generator that doesn't work. I think LM might be working on that, or maybe even has it fixed, but I just use a different map generator and don't worry about it.

 

[PhroX]

Yeah, been a while since I played Civ4, but BUG and BAT were indispensable, even for someone who didn't really feel the game needed mods - the former in particular adds so much user friendliness that you'll wonder how you ever played without it....

 

[Arakhor]

BAT is probably responsible for me not being permanently banned from CFC. They recruited what might be the only person here who I would never spout off at as a moderator and she keeps me in check.

And who says that games don't improve people's lives? ;p

 

[Senethro]

If you like free games and you like to shoot mans in a shootman game then Apex Legends was released this week on EA's Origin. Jet into an island with a squad of randoms, find guns and be the last ones standing in the shrinking battle arena.

Oddly enough my recent career change has got me appreciating all the accessibility features of this game. Good colour blind modes, good voiceless comms features and the game can translate voicechat into text (which i never seen before). Hoping it sets new industry standards.

 

[Arakhor]

Are you colour-blind or is it just a sympathetic appreciation?

 

[Senethro]

While I'm not colour blind myself I've often used colour blind modes in the past when they made icons and features just 'pop' more. The post was more appreciation of the developers (Respawn Entertainment) being good at their jobs and including these features.

 

[MaryKB]

I'm playing co-operative multiplayer Civilization with some nice gentlemen, and I'm at war with Korea. She built the Statue of Liberty in one of her cities, which is letting me invade her without having to worry about Loyalty!

Don't build the Statue in Civilization 6 ... it's more of a liability than a help for you!

 

[Lexicus]

I started playing Napoleon Total War, it's pretty cool, more refined than Empire. I'm currently spanking the Northern Italian campaign, I just captured Parma and my troops are poised to take Mantua.

 

[EgonSpengler]

I'm playing co-operative multiplayer Civilization with some nice gentlemen, and I'm at war with Korea. She built the Statue of Liberty in one of her cities, which is letting me invade her without having to worry about Loyalty!

Don't build the Statue in Civilization 6 ... it's more of a liability than a help for you!

I've never built the Statue of Liberty in Civ VI. It's a bizarre interpretation of the real-life statue, imho (admittedly, I'm still not sure what real-life events or phenomenon, if anything, the Loyalty mechanic is meant to mimic or represent).

I started playing Napoleon Total War, it's pretty cool, more refined than Empire. I'm currently spanking the Northern Italian campaign, I just captured Parma and my troops are poised to take Mantua.

I never got into Napoleon, but I can't remember why. It's possible that I was just burned out on Empire and another, similar game couldn't hold my attention.

 

[Synobun]

Napoleon is more refined than Empire... but locks its play behind mandated campaigns and turn limits. As a result, I rushed through those campaigns and then saw that the free play campaign was still just a shadow of Empire's.

I would have vastly preferred Empire with Napoleon's mechanics.

 

[Lexicus]

I got Napoleon during the winter Steam Sale because it was like 7 bucks.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Napoleon is more refined than Empire... but locks its play behind mandated campaigns and turn limits. As a result, I rushed through those campaigns and then saw that the free play campaign was still just a shadow of Empire's.

I would have vastly preferred Empire with Napoleon's mechanics.

I would love to see an Empire II. I played Empire a lot with DarthMod, for its aesthetic changes - more-convincing musket & cannon sounds; full-sized regiments; more realistic smoke; better flags. The changes to cannon and musket ranges were nice, too. Unfortunately, the mod completely trashed the battle AI, and thus the grand campaign turned into a kind of "sandbox strategy" game, not unlike Civ VI.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

For anyone who is still interested, my ongoing exploration of Civ IV, fighting for every inch is described in detail.

 

[Synobun]

Dead Space 2.

Meh. Pretty short game, not really a compelling story. Ellie's cool. Isaac's a bit of a dweeb.

Pretty well optimized; I only encountered one bug and it was at the very end of the game.

 

[cardgame]

If you like free games and you like to shoot mans in a shootman game then Apex Legends was released this week on EA's Origin. Jet into an island with a squad of randoms, find guns and be the last ones standing in the shrinking battle arena.

I predict the BR genre dead by 2020. The saturation is becoming insane. That said... definitely will be checking it out.

good voiceless comms features and the game can translate voicechat into text (which i never seen before). Hoping it sets new industry standards.

Shazbot!