TheMcD posted:

Baldurk just gets busy sometimes. It might take some time, but he'll get to your request eventually.

Testpost 1 posted:

Football manager.

There's a tradition of like, doing these super in depth let's plays where you like, imagine talking to your players? The gently caress who has time for that poo poo.

: What up b****

Wait, Fred Durst?

: That's right b**** wanna manage some loving footballs, nookie?

I mean... sure I guess.

: Sweet I wear a red hat, let's manage Manchester United.

Okay Mr Durst that's a very oddly specific request, but sure, let's do it. Let's do it all for the Nookie.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAyUzxDB9eE



First things first, let's create our boy.



And make him bad at football.

There's this fun thing to do, make a manager and take a small club (Like Wrexham) and bring them up to the premier league and that's cool, but what if we take a big club and put a really stupid manager in charge instead and see what happens?

We take over Man United. They're kind of falling out of big picture relevance being managed by former player Ole Gunnar Solskjær who has no qualifications other than having previously played for United and therefore knows the "United way" or some stupid poo poo whatever.

I thought it would be funny to set up United to play the dumbest most boring football possible, but then I remembered Louis van Gaal (I spelled his name without googling it hell yeah) and Jose Mourinho beat me to it.



This is how we set up the team. This is the new United Way (tm)
There is some trepedition in so far as the 3-4-3 was broken in a previous version, and so was long ball football, but having really exposed rear with no wide defenders plus three attackers sounds good for let's play hilarity (tm)


Pre season. Who cares. We skip a bunch of useless poo poo (meeting the team, the backroom staff, who cares, details i'm a big picture guy.)
: I directed a film.

You know what Fred I didn't know that. You learn something every day.

: *in a high pitched voice* Ye-uh.

There is a lot of poo poo that gets thrown at you, vision, expectations, poo poo like that. Also friendlies? Holy poo poo. I skip all this as it's very boring and not at all relevant to us. Also, our players are set up for a more realistic formation so we are lacking some pieces, I do a little scouting and sign for 40 million euroes another winger.



Hell yeah, the qualifications required were 'would be someone United Would Sign' and 'Can play Right Wing' he meets both.

Honestly I got a little excited, and I'm doubting it already, also we probably should have signed a Center Back first because they're the most important position and are the most expensive and rarest to find. It's like, the opposite of running back in the NFL? They're a premium position. Unlike running backs. Good luck, Cowboys, by the way. lol.

Also, hilariously, we need 3 CBs instead of just 2.

Because of the above, I decide it's really some time to just, you know, take some "ME" time, and I go on holiday a little r n r you know.



I come back to a lot of emails i'm not going to read, Skip!



lol

despite the fact he's surplus to needs, that would unironically suck because he came back from a broken leg or something horrific in real life and he seems like a good player and a cool guy but got frozen out under Jose during that lost generation of United players.



Here is the state of the squad before the season kick off.

While I was on holiday Martial pulled his groin. This Is Not Great, Bob! We don't have many Strikers as we need. So we technically convert to a 3-4-1-2.

Matchday 1 - EVERTON(H)

I walk into the dressing room and this is it, my opportunity to give the greatest pre-match talk in the history of talks.

For twelve years, you have been asking: Who is Algebra Testes? This is Algebra Testes speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing—you who dread knowledge—I am the man who will now tell you.” The chief engineer was the only one able to move; he ran to a television set and struggled frantically with its dials. But the screen remained empty; the speaker had not chosen to be seen. Only his voice filled the airways of the country—of the world, thought the chief engineer—sounding as if he were speaking here, in this room, not to a group, but to one man; it was not the tone of addressing a meeting, but the tone of addressing a mind.

The team are utterly unmoved by this.

We fall behind early to an Everton screamer, and it's looking bad. Everyone's looking bored and uninterested. Then a Bruno Fernandes thunderbolt on the 44th minute lifts the lads up, and soon after Correa puts Rashford through and suddenly i'm ripping up my team talk and give 'em the old up and at 'em half time talk.

James goes down early in the second half so we throw on Lingard. Everton are crashing on United like a wave, and like the granite stone that United are we resist the pressure. Fred then concedes a penalty which Sigurdson blasts wide. He does not miss the second penalty that we give away. Aside from a late Correa run we look lifeless in attack and venerable in defense.

UNITED 2 - EVERTON 2

: (whispering) You're a counter...fit...(fake)....(sadly) yeah...

Jossar posted:

I'm considering doing a Let's Play for Empire Earth, a RTS that came out in the early 2000s that covers the grand scope of history.

The only problem is that the actual gameplay is... really slow paced. Like upwards of an hour for a single mission of a campaign, possibly two if like me you're a lousy player. An LP where you bore the viewers to tears is a bad LP.

The theoretical solution to this is to have the LP be screenshot based (except maybe for cutscenes), but I kind of worry on the counterpoint that unlike the last LP I did (which was a turn based strategy game), going screenshot kind of drains out most of the gameplay.

How do most people make the decision whether or not to go screenshot or video?

Covok posted:

https://lparchive.org/Star-Wars-Knights-of-the-Old-Republic-I-and-II/

Anyone know what happened to this let's play? It completely vanished.

Covok posted:

Dang. Oh well, I was interested in a video let's play of KOTOR 1 and 2. And the other video LP of Kotor 1 on LP archive is a little...well, someone going "lol why do you guys keep voting the light side choices. Ugh, I will do it but it's not like I like it, baka" is a little...uninteresting.

Artix posted:

There's a story behind that one but yes they deleted their accounts and basically went off to be an internet hermit.

Party Bug posted:

I am currently working on an LP of Hades. Those of you who've played it probably know how bad of an idea that is, but the plan is this: Do video updates for first run and every 5th run or so, then do screenshots updates for the (significant) runs in-between. That plus editing some files to speed up progression should hopefully make this a manageable task.

Anyway here's the first episode:

- https://youtu.be/nJJt2zaWse4

And the following screenshot update:

- https://lpix.org/sslptest/index.php?id=157808

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Rappaport posted:

Diplomacy

FilthIncarnate posted:

Hello friends

so I've got a question, I hear this is the place for that?

I'm sitting on idk 500+ screenshots and an enormous amount of text, mostly diplomatic chatlogs, for a Dominions 5 multiplayer LP, wherein I attempt to do something gonzo.

The thing about my playstyle is: it's incredibly diplomacy-heavy, and basically everything interesting happens in chatlogs, where I'm scheming/duping people etc etc, so I'm trying to think about how to best format it, since it's a little different than the usual version.

Anyway is it crazy to just start throwing information at people or? there's a lot here, idk

dominions itself is a whole thing to understand even before we get into the thing i'm trying to do (win with a very bad nation) and why it is hard/gonzo; i don't know that i have the patience to explain everything from scratch, that seems like a lot of heavy lifting.

i guess i'm asking for advice and suggestions; i've never done this before and idk i probably never will again, but i've been part of the dominions community here for five or so years and i figure it is time to Give Back

thank you in advance for your attention friends

Technowolf posted:

Have Ramc do snarky commentary on the nations and pretenders in the game.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

One opportunity, depending on how you feel about it, would be to rewrite the chat logs as dialogs between in-universe characters. This would let you condense things and inject some fanficcy flavor. If you do do this, just keep in mind that you're putting voices to real people.

Rappaport posted:

I will pre-face this by noting that while I have never played Dominions myself, I have read most of SA LPs, so I know a little about how Dominions works (or doesn't always work very intuitively...). I don't think it'd be a terrible idea to focus on your nation and pretender build, and as you meet other nations, give an overview of why they're very, very bad news for you / chumps / what have you?

My question would be, how long would an average chat-log excerpt be? I guess you'd want to leave the juicy bits in, but if there's giant walls of chat-logs every turn, it could get a bit unreadable. Do you think you would be able to briefly summarize your strategy for a given turn / these or those neighbours, and follow up with the meat of the diplomacy, like when and how other people agree or disagree with you, and your best betrayals feats of friendly diplomacy? And for people not familiar with Dominions, also brief explanations about what you're trying to accomplish, and why you're using a particular approach to particular nations, such as being nice to big bads, or forming mass alliances, or whatever it was you did?

Dominions LPs often are walls of text anyway, and in my personal opinion very long chatlogs are a bit cumbersome. Other Dominions fans should voice their views, though!

Rappaport posted:

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

I don't think anyone will get mad at you for ing. If all we've accomplished is help you clarify how you plan to approach this, that's still good.

kirbysuperstar posted:

I'd probably just have the gameplay. If there's something worthwhile brought up in chat or whatever, it can be spliced in via editing.

Danaru posted:

My personal taste is just gameplay, but plenty of people like the streaming format too. I'd say

OP: posted:

Welcome, comrades, to your new Soviet Republic. It is here we will forge the future of socialism, mostly by massive conga lines of workers and by making sure that our trains don't get stuck facing each other on the same track - a common problem in monstrous capitalist nations. We have assigned you to Mormorsk Prefab Flats 8, it's the one between Prefab Flats 3 and Prefab Flats 6. Look for a district with a Lenin statue, but if you find one with heating pipes, you've gone too far.

It's Worker's and Resources: Soviet Republic!
My first LP ever, but I was encouraged by some folks over in the Management Games Megathread and decided to do something more formal so I don't crap up the thread with what's essentially LP content. I have recently started a new game that I've been documenting fairly in-depth and now is a great time for me to start the initial write-up and let y'all over the border into my yet-to-be-named republic.

Table of Contents:
Nothing yet! I'll post the first update today.

---

Background
The Game: I'll be playing Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic which is an extremely unwieldy named city builder and transport sim. It's simple: Feed and clothe your citizens, make sure they have radios or can go to the movies, then send them over to your mines and factories so they can help produce the goods that will create your republic. What stands out compared to many of these games is that while you can spend money to build like you would in any usual nation/city builder, the goal is to become completely resource independent. You will start creating your own cement and concrete, your own boards, steel, and bricks. Then you'll need vehicles to get them physically to the construction sites. Then you'll need people, excavators, and cranes to get it all assembled. Even with massive efforts, it can take months to build industries like a steel mill. The ultimate goal is to become entirely resource independent. You can even build your own trucks, trains, boats, and planes! This creates an extremely cool level of detail - Trucks don't materialize like Tropico. You have to buy (or build!) those trucks and make point them to the resources they'll need for construction. You need to lay out and design the train lines and large depots to store things. There's no (heavy) abstraction at that layer. This also means that problems that arise are very 'natural' - if there's a traffic jam, its because your designs or orders caused it, not because of any sort of arbitrary number or game weirdness. You can bring your industry to a grinding halt because a crucial road was blocked by a train waiting in a station to fill up with bricks, but your workers can't get to the brick factory because their bus is stuck on the wrong side of the train. Ultimately the game is still in early access and has some really weird jank and odd systems. For those that might buy the game, be aware. You'll want to be comfortable with something like Transport Fever/Open TTD or be willing to futz through learning trains and good transport practices.

The LP Style: I will be posting screenshots and writing a light narrative around them. This is something I basically do in my head during city builders anyway, so writing it down will be fun for me! You can find some posts of my style in the Management thread from my old W&R save. I will probably put more effort (generally) into posts for the LP, since I won't feel as bad cluttering up a not-dedicated LP thread. I am also extremely long-winded when allowed - A warning. I absolutely welcome questions about the game in general - whether my save or yours - because I have a pretty high level of comfort with it and, as mentioned, it has a lot of quirks and weirdness. I'll include some interactive bits that I'd love input about below, too. I also want to caution folks about the quality of the screenshots - The game has a certain charm to its presentation, but many might find it ugly in many ways. Not only is it based in the stark brutalism of Soviet architecture, but the game has lots of browns and grays and doesn't have a lot of nice post processing effects. To me, a lot of screenshots look really rough and grainy. That's just sort of how the game looks in stills - I don't think there's anything I can do about it other than smearing filters from a photo editor on them, which I don't totally fancy doing. (I might need to revisit this at some point.) I could consider doing a discord stream or something for folks but I play this game extremely slowly, spend a lot of time on pause and stare silently at things on pause while I think about them - probably unexciting content.

My background: I play tons of city builders. If there's a city builder that's been out in the past 10-15 years, I've probably played it if not put a ton of time into it. I am not nearly as skilled at aesthetics as some folks who do youtube series and that, but that actually works with the brutalism of W&R. I'm an engineer by day so a lot of my thinking to solve in-game issues is inspired by all those bizarre Design for Lean and Systems Engineering courses and crap like that. I only mention this if people become interested in getting into the nitty-gritty of how I design systems or work through issues in systems, it might provide some context of my approach. I have only a general knowledge of the Soviet Union colored by American high school education, but I've bolstered it a little bit with some brief youtube videos. All in all, not an expert. I'd like to learn more, in small bites at least.

Become a hero of the Republic!
Here's a few things I thought of that I'd love some reader feedback about! Let me know if you have other ideas for how to make this LP more interactive. I am definitely going to keep in mind decisions I can defer to the thread about, but ultimately I'm going to play the game when I want to, so I won't want to wait around for consensus on smaller decisions that I need to make to progress.
Easily Digestible History/Background: Someone in Management games shared a 15 minute youtube explaining Soviet Microdistricts and how they designed their cities and flats. This type of stuff rocks and I'd love to pull together a list of these sorts of short videos, articles, whatever. Would like to keep it to things you can bite out in one sitting (or episodic).
Helpful in-game designs: I've played a lot of management games and city builders, but I've only dabbled in train-system games. Mostly Transport Fever, which does not really require the same level of signalling that W&R does. If you see me doing something stupid or spot an area I can improve, please share! I also really like the idea of folks laying out their own microdistricts because mine are always sort of.. Boring, if efficient. If you don't have the game I can share some detail if people are interested.
I don't speak any Russian: I would love to be naming cities and industrial areas with a more Soviet flavor but I generally just label stuff based on the random names that pop up on the map. I watched my friend who speaks fluent Russian play and his cities were named way cooler. Help me out! I even need a name for the republic as a whole.
Just general suggestions: Hey, it's a Let's play and its about collectivism. Who would I be not to get consensus about direction and decisions?

Guidelines from the Central Committee and General Housekeeping:
-Because the game is literally a Soviet Communism Builder, there's inevitably going to be some discussion about Communism in general, the Soviet Union, etc. I welcome some of this, because its interesting and can provide interesting comparison of the game vs. reality, but be tread carefully - I don't want to descend into nasty arguments about these sorts of things here. We have D&D and CSPAM for that. I will do my best to keep my own content political editorial free (other than tongue-in-cheek references to our "most glorious and perfect republic,'" etc.) I'd generally hope discussion would end up more about planning and industries, but inevitably some of those discussions of real things are going to be naturally intertwined with controversy. Just be reasonable, please!
-The management games thread is the home for general game discussion about W&R, but I don't want to discourage that posting here either. If you see something weird ("why did you design that train switch like that?") and want more general game advice I'm happy to answer, or even help you troubleshoot your own designs.
-No idea what the 'lifetime' of this LP will be, so no promises. I suspect I've picked the worst time to start one as a friend got me Cyberpunk for Christmas (which I intended to wait to play) and then I am getting new flight sim hardware at the end of the month. Still, I should be able to keep it up at a reduced pace until I get back into more W&R. I have a very horrible tendency to love restarting maps, but I will break this habit for this LP. Look at us, we're already helping each other!

Central Committee Approved Viewing and Listening Materials:
Youtube: The Soldier's Dance - look at that glorious backdrop of 1960's Moscow.
Youtube: They have "Sovietwave" now? Enough to stock a youtube music stream? Alright.
Youtube: Alyans - На заре - this is the theme song for the entire LP. Look at that mustache.
Youtube: How did planners design Soviet cities? - brief video on microdistricts. - Thanks luxury handset from the Management Games thread.