Author: littlemute

Laid up ditherings

I got something, either some virus or god knows what off the disease bombs that live in my house and expose me to such things.  While I was largely comatose until 10AM or so, I got in some hours (feverish, granted) of DARK SOULS; managing to finish off the first real boss and then get killed during an invasion almost instantly afterwards.  This is how you do MMO’s frankly.  You either join someone’s game to help them or kill them, all the other mucking about in stores and towns and the socialization aspect is left far behind in the chatrooms where it belongs.  Fights are very fast, at most a few minutes and many over in seconds (like when I was invaded today).  Having trouble with a boss?  Call in someone to help.  Want to kick som ass? Invade other player’s games.  Otherwise the game is fantastic even if you never play it with anyone else–and comes to PC August 28th!

In addition, I spanned some time wandering around the internet and was fully titillated once again by Warlord Games “Bolt Action” by Rick Priestely.  While I have a few AT-43 armies and managed to find all my old 2nd edition 40K stuff recently, I’ve never been a big fan of miniatures games with guns, much preferring the huge blocks of sword and board armed models crushing into each other.  That said,  Bolt Action looks great.  The scale looks about what you’d expect for 25mm. ie not an out of control tank swarm game like 40K.  A couple tanks, about 30-40 guys and you’re good to go.  I will definitely pick the game up when it comes out later this year.   But will it ever get played?  Who can tell…

Crassus, Cicero, Calius, Clodius, Caesar, Cato

Cross it

I just finished Tom Holland’s “Rubicon:” a narrative history of the end of the Roman Republic: i.e.  the part where the senate mattered to the part where the senate didn’t matter any more (except to complain about stuff and get horses appointed to it) along with a lot of fighting.  It was extremely fast paced and well done and if you want to delve into a little piece of Roman history (well, a big piece actually)– this is definitely a book to pick up.  However, and this is no fault of Holland’s, one section of the book  (right before the formation of the Triumvirate of Crassus, Caesar and Pompei) deals with so many historical figures with a name starting with ‘C’ that it becomes totally insane to keep track of them.  I personally got Crassus and Cicero confused MOST of the time, which is ridiculous because they were drastically different people.  Once you get to the next tier of players (Calius, Clodius). it’s almost comical trying to keep track of people and what they did before to lead up to what their doing (and eventually, of course, how they got killed).  I only remembered Clodius because he’s the dude that dressed as a woman to hide in Caesar’s house during the women only ritual of the good goddess and got busted for it.

I would describe this phase of Roman history as the thug showdown at a massive scale.  With the exception of Cicero and Cato, the rest of the bunch, including Octavian, were total gangster thugs when in Rome and pretty much the same outside of it.  The sad fact was, however, that there was no way to survive at that level without being one FULLY.  The last man standing, of course, was Octavian who, having spoken to people who lived through Marius/Sulla and the Caesar/Pompei showdowns was fully prepared to do what needed to be done to gain total power over the Republic.   Anyway, give it a go.  As narrative history, it’s written to not be boring dry micro history or entirely academical historiography, both of which have their place, but maybe not for you.

Gaming rig died

Right during my Skyrim redux to push through to the end of the game it powered off and won’t come on again.  Well the fans come on which means either it’s not getting enough power to fire up proper, or a hard drive died, or the motherboard went.  Thing is, it’s not that old of a machine so I’m hoping it’s just the PSU.    Shiiit…

Rome Total War 2 in the works

As suspected, after Empires, Napoleon and Shogun 2, Creative Assembly has announced Rome Total War 2.  This is a long time in coming, but the company had a lot of ground to cover before getting back to the best!  Needless to say, I’m stoked: just the rumor of this is fappable to the extreme.   Rome Total War was my second favorite game of the early 2000’s, and the only contender against Warcraft 3 for the game of the  decade.  CA made so many improvements from Medieval Total War to Rome that it was almost a completely different game.  It was the first where you could move your armies around inside a territory, rather than just attack at territory and have it go right to battle (ala Genghis Khan 2).    While a smaller map than Medieval, Rome felt huge, both because you really have to work it to hit the edges of the map, and that each faction/nation/city state had a ton of character.  When the eventual civil war happens, it’s both challenging and very rewarding as you crush the other Roman factions as well as the lesser nations.

That said, Rome 2 has to be a masterpiece and likely it will be: CA knows what it’s doing and, other than CIV, has the most successful strategy franchises out there.  While I am not the biggest fan of Shogun 2,  Empires was amazing– I played it so much that I haven’t even cracked open Napoleon.   Medieval 2 wasn’t my favorite either, but coming after Rome, it had massive shoes to fill.

So what will we have in Rome 2 that we didn’t have in Rome:

  1. Detailed real-time naval battles
  2. MAYBE naval+ground battles at the same time (per the screen shots, this looks like it’s happening)
  3. Better AI for marine landings – Shogun 2 had the AI doing bag-around-back army landings from the sea– a first! So no more hiding in Britain knowing the AI can’t get to you because it doesn’t know how to put troops on a boat and drop them off.
  4. Better sieges – they’ve been getting better and better each game, and it’s the best thing about Shogun 2
  5. “Well of Nations” – Rome Total War barbarian invasion players will know what I’m referring to here– the Cimbri, Huns, Parthians seem to come out of nowhere in massive hordes historically and while the original Rome didn’t do much with this– the expansion had it in spades and was, ever so slightly, the better game for it because you never knew what was going to spill over the horizon into your empire.  This was a key factor in the post-Punic War era.