|
So I've been following some videos, is the frame rate still supposed to be around 20's even in single player? I've got a tower capable of playing games like Bioshock Infinite at 60 FPS Ultra settings and this still seems a bit like lagging.
|
#
?
May 13, 2013 01:11
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 6, 2024 04:34 |
|
|
It's capped by the engine at 24fps, apparently. You can render it at faster than that but it won't change anything on the display.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2013 01:20
|
|
|
Is that new with the HD edition? I kind of notice it seems choppier than the original was...
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2013 01:54
|
|
|
Played a 3v3 Black forest game due to boredom since I usually loathe black forest. Decided to pick turks to practice my fast imp build and wanted to try to hit my opponent with fast hand cannoners and bombard cannons. Sadly, the dumb host decided it would be fun to turn on Full Tech Tree...which means I lost all of my bonuses...no 15% faster gold mining (crucial for the 800 gold needed to imp), no free chemistry (crucial for getting hand cannoners out 2-3 minutes earlier), and no free hussars (saves about 800 gold in upgrades). Ended up doing a lovely build because of that, but we still managed to win somehow even though my town was getting pummeled. If anyone is interested (or bored) you can watch the game here: http://www.twitch.tv/toao_imperial_5/b/402908196
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2013 07:57
|
|
|
Oh man, I literally just found out that this game existed. I've been wanting to play AOEII again for years and bemoaned it not being on Steam or GFWL or ANYTHING. Going to be counting the days and readying this thread until my next payday. So excited.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2013 08:44
|
|
|
Full tech tree turns off civ bonuses too? That's lame. What's the point of picking any given civ then, other than unique unit or appearance?
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2013 18:08
|
|
|
C-Euro posted:Full tech tree turns off civ bonuses too? That's lame. What's the point of picking any given civ then, other than unique unit or appearance? Exactly, full tech tree turns off all civ bonuses and makes every civ the same except for your unique unit and unique tech(s), it's lame.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2013 18:53
|
|
|
Some unique techs are more relevant than others with Full Tech Tree on, to be sure. Goth Perfusion and Anarchy is still terrifying, even if the soldiers aren't as cheap as before.
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2013 04:43
|
|
|
ronya posted:Some unique techs are more relevant than others with Full Tech Tree on, to be sure. Goth Perfusion and Anarchy is still terrifying, even if the soldiers aren't as cheap as before. yeah but apart from that it just makes all civs the same...which is kind of dumb. Perfusion and Anarchy are must-techs regardless of whether full tech tree is on or not. I've been practicing doing Fast Imp strats with turks lately, usually when I'm the pocket in a 3v3 or 4v4, it's pretty fun rolling into the enemy's town with bombard cannons, hand cannoners and monks at around 25-26 minutes, you can take down town centers pretty fast. I might do a buildup of it sometime soon and post it with a writeup, I quite like the strategy but it depends on you being untouched for the first half of the game...which is almost never possible on open maps.
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2013 05:41
|
|
|
I tried out the Kyoto scenario. The AI threw a lot of elite samurai at me, and all I had was a bunch of cavalry archers. Combined with how two of the three castles were easily reached by cannon ships the map was quite boring.
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2013 15:26
|
|
|
the gimmick of the Kyoto scenario is not the castles but the Relic countdown, which the map encourages by giving you a weak secondary enemy to keep you busy initially. The monastery cannot be reached easily from the sea, and merely destroying the monastery still requires you to ship monks over to snag at least one relic or somehow hold on to the area, or Kyoto will just re-garrison them elsewhere. If you don't take the bait and hit Kyoto hard and quickly, though, then the scenario becomes uneventful. Notably, the relic garrisoning doesn't appear to be triggered; it relies wholly on the AI's inclination to eventually collect relics. The playtesters that Ensemble had seem to be really, really into a turtle style of play, or some of the campaign designs are a little hard to explain.
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2013 15:39
|
|
|
I see, the AI decided to mostly ignore those and by the time I was riding through the streets I saw a few of them still lined up not far from where I smashed through their wall.
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2013 16:05
|
|
|
Anyone else playing through the original campaigns? I expected to come back (having last played it when I was 16) and find it all super easy, but that hasn't been the case at all. I'm not sure whether playing on the Hard difficulty setting actually means something, or whether they really were just that difficult to begin with. Particularly the second last Saladin mission. Thank god I built my original castle just outside the starting town, because immediately after the first triggered attack, yellow's fleet showed up with 15 Galleons and some cannon Galleons. I just packed my town up and moved it inland. Also the little orange town in the south didn't do anything all game. Makes me think I got off easy there. And then surprisingly the next mission wasn't bad at all. Immediately built two trebs and as many Mamluks as I could afford, bum rushed England, and then pretty much sat around without any problems until the end. Had 5 castles around the landward side of my base though. 
PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 00:59 on May 15, 2013 |
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 00:47
|
|
Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
|
PittTheElder posted:Particularly the second last Saladin mission. Thank god I built my original castle just outside the starting town, because immediately after the first triggered attack, yellow's fleet showed up with 15 Galleons and some cannon Galleons. I just packed my town up and moved it inland. Also the little orange town in the south didn't do anything all game. Makes me think I got off easy there. Yeah, I'm playing through all the campaign missions on moderate because I'm not that good. On the 2nd to last Saladin mission though, the orange team at the bottom built a wonder in the back of their base (behind a shitload of walls and towers) that I had to destroy or else it was game over. Your strat on the last mission was way better than mine. I tried to defend them to death till they ran out of gold and then built my wonder while my army of elite mamelukes ran around destroying all of the incoming enemy siege equipment. Fully upgraded Elite Mamelukes (or however it's spelled) are seriously the best units; you can kite endlessly and murder just about anything.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 04:14
|
|
|
The final Joan of Arc mission took me nearly three hours, but other than that things haven't been terrible since I'm probably better at the game now than I was back when I first played these campaigns in the original release. Currently on mission 3 of Saladin though I just got started.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 04:31
|
|
|
One campaign map that pissed me off was the one for the Mongols where you invade China. The purple Chinese players way down in the rear end end of the map, tucked behind several other players (including Green with the great wall), kept building a wonder on me pretty early in the game and I could never get my poo poo down there fast enough to destroy it in time.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 06:56
|
|
|
dat one portagee posted:One campaign map that pissed me off was the one for the Mongols where you invade China. The purple Chinese players way down in the rear end end of the map, tucked behind several other players (including Green with the great wall), kept building a wonder on me pretty early in the game and I could never get my poo poo down there fast enough to destroy it in time. Same thing happened to me but with the yellow guys. I used transport ships to get around the wall and landed shitloads of UUs and rams and kicked his rear end ASAP.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 07:20
|
|
|
I had the AI sitting out on the island build a wonder (think it was yellow), and it was surprisingly easy to just sail across the straight south of the town and land cavalry, monks and trebuchets and then stomp their whole town into rubble.  Taking out the other three jerks was more challenging as they kept running around workers inside their pen rushing up new buildings all over the place so I had to resort to the Empire Earth tactic of building walls and towers (very Mongolian tactic by the way) to herd them. Really annoying when one jerk citizen hides inside one of the other civs towns and plops down a few military buildings including a siegeworkshop that starts making GBS threads out rams everywhere.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 09:16
|
|
|
If the "build a Wonder" things fail to trigger, as they should, some of the missions become boring slogfests. See: Into China. There's a mission in the Attila campaign which even has four Wonder countdowns in a row, just in case you didn't get the idea after the first one. It's a great challenge for players who love to dig into territory and sally out only with fully-upgraded units.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 10:15
|
|
|
Yeah that mission was a lot of fun. Just one long and massive conquest of weaklings to be trodden into the mud. I didn't bother chasing down the last villagers of the first town I razed and they eventually gathered enough resources to start a second wonder. Too bad for them they decided on building outside their now derelict walls and prioritized it above rebuilding their military. Quod vita.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 10:23
|
|
|
Wow, I really suck at this game. I'm one of those idiots who just plays Sim City until I have a fully-upgraded army, or just creep towers across the map into the enemy base. I was playing the first Huns mission (I think, the one where you have to get the boar to kill a dude), and I got my rear end kicked on easy.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 14:53
|
|
|
I love playing as huns, all you do is build poo poo loads of Calvary and Calvary archers and you're invincible. Plus they have awesome trebs. I think the hun campaign is probably my favorite. You can really tell the difference in map quality between the original campaigns and the conquerors.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 15:41
|
|
|
dat one portagee posted:I love playing as huns, all you do is build poo poo loads of Calvary and Calvary archers and you're invincible. Plus they have awesome trebs. I think the hun campaign is probably my favorite. You can really tell the difference in map quality between the original campaigns and the conquerors. They also have Tarkans! I learned the hard way that you really have to pump out Magonels and Pikemen/Halberdiers when up against the Huns. Otherwise, you're going down really god drat fast. I was surprised to see how quickly a handful of Tarkans can take out a castle. I can usually hold my own on moderate difficulty now, but I got completely slaughtered by moderate Hun CPUs on a random map in no time. I guess the Huns near-broken level of awesome is balanced out by their totally bogus unique tech (unless you're playing Regicide or Defend the Wonder, then it becomes incredibly useful). Mak0rz fucked around with this message at 16:05 on May 15, 2013 |
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 16:01
|
|
|
I played as the Huns the other day and was thrown for a loop when they had the same "central Europe" building style as the Teutons and Goths. I know that historically they were located in eastern Europe and the western fringes of Asia but I can't get the super-Asian Huns from Mulan out of my head 
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 17:38
|
|
|
frosteh posted:Your strat on the last mission was way better than mine. I tried to defend them to death till they ran out of gold and then built my wonder while my army of elite mamelukes ran around destroying all of the incoming enemy siege equipment. Fully upgraded Elite Mamelukes (or however it's spelled) are seriously the best units; you can kite endlessly and murder just about anything. I was just so goddamn sick of longbowman from the Joan of Arc campaign that I wasn't about to let them get established. And if you think Mamluks are great (it is in fact Mameluke in game, but Mamluk is the usual historical transliteration), just wait till you get Mangudai. Those murder machines make the Mongol campaign a walk in the park. Though incidentally, the first Mongol mission where you don't get them at all might be my favorite of the entire original game, just because of good level design. Also, fun cheese strategy for the last Saladin mission: Get setup, survive the first few attacks, mine all the stone and gold in your base, and build like 8 Galleons. Sail due west from your base until you find a little island with a ton of gold on it. Keep your galleons out there, and mine all the gold, starting with the north patch. Build a castle and a dock on the north part of the island. Then mine all the south gold. Build your wonder on the south part, and then just demolish all your starting base and wait out the counter. Teal (the guys with the navy) never even built Imperial Age ships in my game, so they were never even remotely a threat. As it was, I was in a strong enough position to just build the wonder in my main town anyway, but I thought the island was safer (and funnier).
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 18:02
|
|
|
C-Euro posted:I know that historically they were located in eastern Europe and the western fringes of Asia but I can't get the super-Asian Huns from Mulan out of my head Note that this information is from Wikipedia and that I am in no way a European/Asian historian or anything remotely close to it, but according to a short blurb in their opening paragraph the Mongolian tribes that are sometimes referred to as "Huns" (i.e. the ones depicted in Mulan) were actually Xiongnu and their relationship to the European Huns, if any at all, is not really evident. The Hunnic Empire stretched about as far east as western Russia. Mak0rz fucked around with this message at 19:08 on May 15, 2013 |
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 19:02
|
|
|
Also being a Hun was not so much an ethnicity as a way of life. Loads of Sarmatians, Goths, Gepids, Germans, and whatnot served Attilla, and called themselves Huns. It's true that the Huns originated in Central Asia, but by the time they reached Rome they would have changed a lot.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 19:31
|
|
|
Are mangudai really that much better than heavy cav archers?
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 19:42
|
|
|
dat one portagee posted:Are mangudai really that much better than heavy cav archers? Killing those nasty trebs with Mangudai is so fun!
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 20:33
|
|
|
Morholt posted:Also being a Hun was not so much an ethnicity as a way of life. Loads of Sarmatians, Goths, Gepids, Germans, and whatnot served Attilla, and called themselves Huns. It's true that the Huns originated in Central Asia, but by the time they reached Rome they would have changed a lot. Note that this is true of Steppe peoples in general. You have Hunnic looking Mongols and Mongol looking Huns; being the most mobile and least institutionalized people on the planet leads to fairly well mixed ethnicities. dat one portagee posted:Are mangudai really that much better than heavy cav archers? It depends on what you mean by "that much better", but yeah, they're a significant upgrade. The two main differences are a significantly higher rate of fire and a bonus versus siege- which is one of the better counters against HCAs- but from the anecdotal experience of playing a shitload of Mongols I can also say that HCAs in general feel more sluggish and don't group up as well, so without looking at actual statistics I think mangudai might well be faster and are individually smaller so they make a formation (and so maneuver) better.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 20:37
|
|
|
Koramei posted:but from the anecdotal experience of playing a shitload of Mongols I can also say that HCAs in general feel more sluggish and don't group up as well, so without looking at actual statistics I think mangudai might well be faster and are individually smaller so they make a formation (and so maneuver) better.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 20:50
|
|
|
ronya posted:The playtesters that Ensemble had seem to be really, really into a turtle style of play, or some of the campaign designs are a little hard to explain. A lot of RTSes don't really make that possible, but in AOK it somewhat is on certain maps with good walling (eg black forest) ShadowHawk fucked around with this message at 21:42 on May 15, 2013 |
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 21:35
|
|
|
I find building up an army and actually getting into the things that make a given civ unique (which doesn't really start until the Castle Age) a lot more fun than just getting to the Feudal Age and pumping out a dozen skirmishers & spearmen before your opponent does. Obviously rushing is effective more often than not but why ignore so much of the game?
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 21:48
|
|
|
It was never supposed to be about spearmen and skirmishers. But ES couldn't decide whether it wanted to chase after the 30-minute-1v1s-Arabia crowd, or those who wanted five hour trench warfare. In the end it died to this vacillation. If you read reports from way back, it seems the devs indeed only very rarely rushed, and used units only like they were supposed to. It's why the William Wallace campaign instructs people to make small groups of M@A and march them across the map, which is about as horrid a way to rush as can be done. The evolution of strategies upon release reflects this - the idea of planting tons and tons of town centers all over your opponent's base just caught them off guard. dat one portagee posted:Are mangudai really that much better than heavy cav archers? Yes. Note that they get a civ bonus as well, and have a generically good tech tree complement. But the here are the Mongol light cavalry line, for the hitpoint bonus. The light cavalry upgrade from Scout is really cheap, and Bloodlines + 30% gives you a 98hp horse for 80 food.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 22:20
|
|
|
Don't forget their unique technology, Drill, lets fully-garrisoned siege rams go hilariously fast. It takes a bit to get there and it's not always practical, but racing rams around the map is fun as hell.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 22:43
|
|
|
C-Euro posted:I find building up an army and actually getting into the things that make a given civ unique (which doesn't really start until the Castle Age) a lot more fun than just getting to the Feudal Age and pumping out a dozen skirmishers & spearmen before your opponent does. Obviously rushing is effective more often than not but why ignore so much of the game? You're not ignoring so much of the game, a game between 2 similarly skilled players can go well into the imperial age even though both players began attacking in the feudal age with skirms and spears. Also, Civ bonuses come into play way before castle age, especially with civs like huns, vikings, and mongols, all which have amazing early game bonuses that make them the best at rushing in the feudal age (in the case of vikings, their cheap docks make for a much easier dark age build up and subsequent galley rush on water maps). In fact I'd go as far as to say that those who are playing no-rush games or black forest games where the majority of the fighting happens in the imperial age that they're the ones missing half the game by not starting to fight early, there are certain units that shine in the early ages but aren't really that great in imperial, rams are amazing in the castle age but people in no-rush games would probably skip them and go for trebs instead, for example.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 23:21
|
|
|
I just like amassing giant Imperial Age armies and enacting a scorched earth policy on my enemies, is that so wrong? I am, at least, working on my rushing technique.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2013 23:32
|
|
|
Guess I should start using Mangudai more often! I forgot about the bonus to siege equipment. Didn't know they were faster as well. Fano - just got around to watching that stream of you doing the fast imp with the turks. Your villagers got owned by those pesky wolves a couple times! Red did a pretty nice little fake out with those rams at your gate before cutting through the forest around back, at least that's what it appeared he was trying to do. Also, yeah, all tech is dumb...
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2013 00:45
|
|
|
If there's one kind of game I consistently lose at, it's anything that involves using god drat boats . Does anyone have any tips on naval warfare rr at least on the kinds of maps that require sea travel (such as team islands or whatever). One thing I guess I could have done was tried to get another colony going in the bowels of the enemy's island, or at least just built a dozen barracks (I was Gothin'). My opponent were the very monk-centric Aztecs, though, and going up against those with a civ that can't learn Heresy is loving irritating.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2013 01:47
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 6, 2024 04:34 |
|
|
dat one portagee posted:Guess I should start using Mangudai more often! I forgot about the bonus to siege equipment. Didn't know they were faster as well. I did a better one the other day but I can't remember if I was streaming it or not...gotta dig through the vods. I also just played a really awesome game on archipelago, for anyone who wants to learn water map based build orders: http://www.twitch.tv/toao_imperial_5/c/2289637 With water maps, getting control of the sea is often enough to guarantee the win, you usually won't have to land your opponent unless he's being stubborn and not resigning, on the other hand, if you lack sea control and want to get it back, landing your opponent is often a good way to distract him while you build up your navy. Notice how in the above game my teammate got landed but he held out and we eventually won. Fano fucked around with this message at 03:01 on May 16, 2013 |
|
#
?
May 16, 2013 02:54
|
|