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

My friend's been pressuring me to play Rome 2 with him for years, like my puppy bumps into me with a toy to subtly hint he wants to play.

I'm naturally very resistant to trying new things, especially while I still haven't gotten tired of the games I'm playing, but after watching a video of a player wreck a Roman transport fleet with ballista ships, I'm intrigued by the maritime possibilities.

 

While not an RTS, I cannot recommend Dominions 5 highly enough for a truly awesome strategy.

I've actually been playing a German RPG I got a long time ago but never really tried out, Drakensang. The RPG mechanics were clearly designed by Germans who enjoy doing spreadsheets for fun*, and the voice acting is nonexistent; but the visuals are pretty enough and it is a fairly standard high fantasy adventure.

*To carry out any action, such as skinning animals or attacking an enemy, you roll three d20s. They all have to be below three of your stats. However, if you fail on them, you can use the number of points you have in that skill to "boost" the d20 so you don't fail. Then, the number of skill points you have left over increases the chance of additional effects.

 

Later on there is a multipart mission where you have to extract child slaves via the chopper, it wouldnt make sense to allow you to extract children with the fulton before you reach this part of the story
No complaints about how all the female snipers have to wear battle thongs because, they use photosynthesis to charge their powers ?

 

These wild Hoothoot are driving me crazy. I swear that the 60% accuracy Hypnosis is more like 90% when they use it.

I caught a female Koffing (named her Miasma, hardy nature) in Ecruteak's Burned Tower and leveled up my Vulpix (Foxy Lady) enough to get both Will o'Wisp and Confuse Ray. Then I switched her out to level up my Togepi, who promptly destroyed himself through a Metronome'd Self-Destruct against a Drowzee. Have to love Metronome.

EDIT: Metronome got me Hydro Cannon. That would be pretty awesome, except...it was against a level 4 Wooper with Water Absorb. Ouch.

 

They're pretty crap when you fight transports, because if their slow butts catch you (which they will, eventually, unless you are a king of micro) they automatically win because they have like 3x the number of troops on deck.

 

Thats historically accurate, as the Romans had the best heavy infantry in the world while other Maritain nations such as Carthage had expert seaman and dominated naval battles
Eventually the Romans realize they could not compete on a ship to ship bases and developed tactics to make use of their better heavy infantry in naval warfare.

 

I am decent at naval micro in Shogun 2. I like to use Fire Bomb Kobayas to wreck whole fleets by luring them into mined straits, or by cutting across their bows and then dropping mines right into them. We'll have to see.

I'm leaning towards Carthage because of our probably shared Phoenician background and their sweet naval strength.

 

I don't have Total Warhammer - back in those heady days of about 15 days ago there was localised distribution, i.e. games translated, hotkeys changed, everything. Installing mods (and we didn't have broadband then and cellphones were big brick-sized work tools) was a huge buttock pain back in the day. The XP partition has the untouched R:TW, GTA III, GTA VC and a few other golden oldies from those times still running.

So, real-time strategy!
AoE I and II - played the crap outta them. btw it's the old versions, on CD installer from God-knows-when.
RoN - can get more random, I might try it.
Warcraft III - I never completed the campaigns at the time, but as I recall (and TVTropes and warcraft wikia have confirmed) it really did have an IdiotPlot/ArseholePlot, and some of the characters have really been changed in the meantime. But the gameplay was superb.
I'll make the decision in the next few days, once I've either gotten the CD/DVD drive to work or given up and bought a new one.

Vidjagames: saving relationships since whenever Tim was born.

 

There....actually weren't...any video games then...

 

Video games go back to 1948 (though before stuff like Pong, the definition was a lot looser). You're older than that?

 

No, I'm not older than that. I just wasn't using such loose definitions. Suffice to say that when an old school pinball player at the local arcade sneered at the Pong machine and said "that'll never catch on" I was there to argue about it.

Spoiler :

But I didn't, because I didn't really think he was wrong, and I had only recently reached the height where I could play pinball without an embarrassing stool to stand on.

 

And back then you had to go to work to play video games as you usually didn't have that mainframe at home

 

When asked about the very first video game ever released most experts will tell you that it was Pong, the famous table tennis inspired video game released in 1972 by Atari Inc. But Pong wasn't the first one, as a company called Nutting Associates had already released their Computer Space game in 1971.

no video games in 1948, indeed, no video

 

Huh, it's nice to see that other people like Total War games as well. I recently (re)started playing Rome 2 Total War. Turns out that the Seleucids have a pretty nice mix of units

Shogun 2... I still hate the realm divide. In one of my games, I built up a treasury of something like 200 000 koku, and I had an income of 10 000 per turn. I cut my army as small as possible, to only 2 stacks. Yet when the realm divide hit, my income dropped so much that I couldn't even maintain those two stacks, which were the bare minimum to winning wars. Eventually I just got frustrated and quit

That's why you never build a navy with only siege ships. Have your ballista ships do damage to the enemy transports, and as they move closer, move your infantry ships in front of your ballista ships to protect them. When the enemy gets close, order ballista ships to fire at their backline, and order your infantry ships to ram their transports. Then, as their transports engage your infantry ships, order your ballista ships to ram their ships which are now conveniently tied down

 

There was Turochamp, a chess simulation initially written in 1948. Though to be fair, there weren't any computers back then that could actually run it. So it's a rather loose definition.

 

Wow, my income's never dropped like that...but then, I rely mostly on ashigaru rather than samurai. They're so upgradable, affordable, and available everywhere, so they're ideal for me.

As the Mori, I also like to seize all of the southern trade nodes and fill them with ten trade ships each, which can fuel my economy pretty well. Trade with other clans is lucrative but it funds them too, and they'll almost always try to get you sooner or later since There Can Be Only One! Farming everywhere and intensively also helps.

Can multiple ships board at once? I know Shogun 2 only allowed one ship to board at a time, which was weird.

 

Fixed for you.

 

I tried RTS games a few times. They hurt my head.

 

I don't play many RTS games, find too much is going on for me to properly enjoy them.
Turn based games allows me time to think about my actions.

 

Even turn-based games are a little much for me in recent years (slightly impaired executive function), but due to the nature of them it's a bit more manageable.