What are you playing right now?

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I've been mostly playing Battlefield 1 for a while now, but to change things up a bit I tried getting back into my Rome 2 campaign last night and this morning. It had been a good while since I played that. I''ve been using the Radious mod, playing as Athens. I'd conquered the Greek peninsula and a good chunk of the Balkans like late last summer, and then I'd turned my attentions to an invasion of Rome. I'd conquered the south and east of Italy, and laid siege to Rome itself. Unfortunately, the Romans kept bringing more armies in from the west and Gaul, and the war had turned quite costly for both sides, with a number of meat-grinding battles. That was where I'd left off whenever I last played it. When I started back up last night, the meat grinding continued.

I started off by making a strategic blunder and sending one of my armies in the north of Italy to besiege a nearby enemy city, leaving my own settlement undefended. I thought it wouldn't be a problem, though, because the nearest Roman army was in the city I was besieging, and while the odds of defeating them and the garrison in battle weren't ideal, I guess I thought I could at least bottle them up for a turn or two. What I didn't expect was the arrival of a second Roman army from further north, which attacked my besieging forces. I was going to be in way over my head against two big armies and the garrison, so I was forced to retreat, and then one Roman army headed for my undefended settlement. My garrison was more than up to the task, however, and slaughtered them, leaving only one Roman unit to survive. However, they then had to do it again later in the same turn against a Massillian army -Roman allies- which also took me by surprise. They too were crushed, but that time the garrison took significant losses as well. And then in the south, things got worse. The city of Rome was close to being forced to surrender, and the large Roman garrison came out for a fight. The army I had besieging Rome was... not ideal. It was a full stack army with archers and ballistae, but most of their infantry were hoplites, with three units of Samnite mercenary swordsmen. This facing a Roman garrison mainly consisting of legionaries. This was not going to be pretty. I learned long ago that hoplites suck in a siege (at least when attacking), but I guess whenever I last played I was short on armies, and I think I figured I'd bring another army over with some heavy swordsmen to replace the hoplites. However, that didn't happen. The Roman garrison sallied out, and I held some hope that the hoplites would be able to hold the Roman infantry in place long enough for me to surround them and break their morale, a hope which I gave up as soon as I saw the Roman lines (as they ran at my lines at full tilt) were wider than mine. The Romans crushed my infantry line and hardly broke a sweat in the process. I managed to retreat with the archers and ballistae, but the nearly all of my infantry were lost. So, that's two enemy armies destroyed (they have more), one of my armies out of commission for a few turns, one of my settlements weakened to the point that it may require tying up one of my armies to defend it for a few turns, and nothing gained in territory for either side. These Romans are ****ers to fight. They have so many armies, so many large garrisons (thanks to the mod, garrisons can be as big as armies), and while their spearmen aren't a problem, their swordsmen are tough. Even the lighter sword units (Hastati) can be a challenge for my men, and the heavier units like legionaries are downright dangerous.
 
Use thorax hoplites, unless the radious mod has given the romans idiotic overpowered units like it usually does. In that case pump out armies of 8-12 pikemen with a second line of thureos spears and some hippeus lancers. The Romans shouldn't have many skirmishers so you can basically stretch out across the entire map with your pikes and shoot them to death as they try to break through.
 
vomit

Rome 2 is the only total war game with some decent variety in infantry where heavy swordsmen don't dominate everything. My main gripe with radious is how it tries to fill every gap in every faction when the gaps are what makes the factions interesting to begin with. Athens is a spear faction full of specialised hoplites who are challenging and fun to use against celts and romans, so by adding elite swords it just obsoletes all those unique units with one swordsman you can spam. If anything, using the swordsmen is cheating, while stretching your pikes across the entire map is realism.

The most fun I've ever had in a campaign in any total war game was playing pre-dlc garamantia with nothing but cheap spearmen and slingers vs Rome. It's not even particularly hard, but it feels so much better when you make the tools rather than being handed them on a platter.

tl;dr you're playing the game wrong reeeeeeeeee
Also radious is triple overgay
 
BIGGER Kentucky James XXL said:
vomit

Rome 2 is the only total war game with some decent variety in infantry where heavy swordsmen don't dominate everything. My main gripe with radious is how it tries to fill every gap in every faction when the gaps are what makes the factions interesting to begin with. Athens is a spear faction full of specialised hoplites who are challenging and fun to use against celts and romans, so by adding elite swords it just obsoletes all those unique units with one swordsman you can spam. If anything, using the swordsmen is cheating, while stretching your pikes across the entire map is realism.

The most fun I've ever had in a campaign in any total war game was playing pre-dlc garamantia with nothing but cheap spearmen and slingers vs Rome. It's not even particularly hard, but it feels so much better when you make the tools rather than being handed them on a platter.

tl;dr you're playing the game wrong reeeeeeeeee
Also radious is triple overgay

Hey Jacob, just wondering if that modlist you made for Rome 2 way back when still works with the latest version/patches?
 
Rome 2 sucks now because

1. the desert kingdoms dlc made all the crappy aethiopian and saharan factions actually formidable and fleshed out which isn't what I want at all. Mainly because I'm a massive white supremacist who hates women, but also because they were excellent 'challenge factions' which now seem just as easy as everyone else.
2. The trees. THE TREES. They ruined them. Some smoothbrain working on thrones of Britannia changed the shader for most of the foliage so now it looks like shaved polystyrene. I can't stress how much this ruins the game for me.
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3. The update broke some of the settlement shadows.

I haven't touched it in months. Some of my.favourite mods died and never came back and the thought of a vanilla campaign sickens me.
 
BIGGER Kentucky James XXL said:
Rome 2 is the only total war game with some decent variety in infantry where heavy swordsmen don't dominate everything. My main gripe with radious is how it tries to fill every gap in every faction when the gaps are what makes the factions interesting to begin with. Athens is a spear faction full of specialised hoplites who are challenging and fun to use against celts and romans, so by adding elite swords it just obsoletes all those unique units with one swordsman you can spam. If anything, using the swordsmen is cheating, while stretching your pikes across the entire map is realism.
I admit I'm no expert at Rome 2, but the way I've been looking at it is, spears are for holding the enemy, swords are for killing them. Sword units seem much better at inflicting casualties than spearmen, but I can often rely upon my hoplites to hold a position for an extended period of time while I work on flanking the enemy with other units. That is, if the hoplites don't get completely overrun like they did against those Romans. And I'd definitely want swordsmen if I was besieging. I lost a battle once when I sent a bunch of hoplites over a wall, only for them to get flattened by a zerg rush of barbarian levy spears once they were inside. Hoplites can't cut their way through defenders the way swordsmen can.
 
So long as you survive the first few turns its easy as pie. The pre dlc garamantians on the other hand have one mediocre mid tier spear unit and the rest is garbage.

The real challenge is Dahae, which I'm pretty sure is mathematically impossible to beat.

Arvenski said:
I admit I'm no expert at Rome 2, but the way I've been looking at it is, spears are for holding the enemy, swords are for killing them.

This is the standard RTS cliche but Rome 2 is more interesting than that in my opinion. Swordsmen in Rome 2 either have a high charge with low armour, or vice versa, and none of them have good armour piercing damage. Hoplites have both, and they also have unit masses which are high enough to basically shrug off most cavalry. There are lots of situations where hoplites aren't good at holding the line and should be used more like shock infantry.

Also light hoplites are my favourite unit in the game even though they aren't even that great.
 
I did a campaign with them up until the point where it starts to get boring, although it was a few patches ago and  I think I might have got lucky when Makedon died to one of its vassals or Epirus or something. Either way it's not the roster that makes them difficult like the garamantians.
 
Pillars of Eternity 1, with expansions

Decided to increase difficulty, I was using zero potions/traps/scrolls, no effort at all. This means higher level enemies, with more abilites, and more of them.
Then the game design flaws came into view

- Ranged attacks have no visual indications, and the AI seems to like focusing fire. Suddenly one of my characters loses half of health/endurance, so I have to read the system chat like a log and try to find the lines that name my character.
- Buffs+debuffs+poisons= you HAVE to pause the game and check every character, to see what, and for how long, is affecting them. Column of text to the top of screen. 3 different DoT effects on you? No visual changes on characters.
- No transparencies. Come on, the first Diablo already had it. I can't even see what's going on because of some tree. Not to mention when you are fighting trolls/wyrms and they completely block the view with their bodies. Not even outlines of the characters.
- Related to previous issue, I have to look at the avatars of the characters to know what they are doing, and if they have finished doing it, because graphics and things actually happening are out of sync.
- Inconvenience is not difficulty, is inconvenience. Part of high difficulty is limiting your camping supplies to 2 instead of 5. But nothing is stopping you from retracing your steps, leave the current dungeon, go back to the nearest inn and sleep there. Just some loading screens and time to cross the area. Bravo.
- Pathfinding. Characters blocking each other like is an RTS from 1996.
- "You can't use that out of combat" Is a potion to run faster. Or a wall made of magic. Or summoning some monsters. No, that's unfair, the enemy must be charging at you while you "prepare", so they have a chance of interrupt/stun/paralize. Such a marvelous design to promote the use of stealth, not.
 
I never got the need to recreate the actual gameplay elements of the old Infinity Engine games. When people nostalgically reminisce about Baldur's Gate and the like, they're usually talking about the writing, the characters, the story, the quests, and very rarely about the actual gameplay. Real-time with pause is an abomination of a combat system that never should have been inflicted on the cRPG, and it goes to show just how outmoded and terrible it was even at the time when it appears in games today. It was one of the reasons why I loathed Pillars of Eternity/Tyranny.

Even worse, it's infected the Western RPG in general to the point where even today, games like the new Pathfinder one are jettisoning their tabletop rulesets of the perfectly-logical, readable and more tactical turn-based combat in favour of similar real-time with pause combat.
 
Currently playing the old action RPG 'Dungeon Siege' from way back. Bought I and II on Steam months ago, and couldn't be arsed to play them at the time. After some tinkering to get it running properly on Win10, and enabling the DLC, it's all aboard the nostalgia train. Looking forward to getting into the second instalment, as I have some fond memories of that, from many years ago.
 
I'm playing various mods for battlefront 2. They're still being updated and developed after almost 15 years and some of the game modes added are insane.

Cordor once said battlefront 2 is a musou game like dynasty warriors and I've had it stuck in my head ever since. The modders clearly understand this and so every mod makes the weapons way more overpowered, makes the battles much bigger and reduces health across the board.

There's even a zombie mode on the Tantive IV where one team is stormtroopers and the other is reskinned wampas who ressurect you ad make you switch to the zombie team when you get killed. There are hundreds of bots running around the corridors and only 1 zombie but it quickly gets out of control. It's amazing.
 
Did a rerun of Baldur's Gate 2.  Normally when i rerun it I do a solo sorceror, but this time I decided to try playing as a thief - swashbuckler kit, to be precise.  **** gets ridiculous.  Decided to yoink my way through the Underdark the first time and get thru as fast as I could by killing the dragon, so now I'm going back through to get pieces of the Equalizer.  Just ran through the Beholder lair and levelled up 3 times in that one area, and I'm using the helm of cheese that gives a cast of a spell that makes an exact copy of your character in his current state for like 14 rounds.  So I have 2 level 32 dual wielding rogues that can each use whirlwind to give them each 10 attacks in a round, 3 times a day.  Kinda funny watching a roomful of beholders go down before they can even hurt me.
e - plus, the copy character is good as bait for anything I can't kill.  Can throw down 6 traps, each of which deal 20d6 damage to a single enemy, to **** up their health before they even start swinging.  Kinda excited for Throne of Bhaal.
 
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