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GunnerJ posted:Probably should have seen that coming! Defect? 
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Jan 15, 2017 17:55
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AJ_Impy posted:Defect? Dab.
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Jan 15, 2017 19:30
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ThaumPenguin posted:Dab. Do just fine, thank you very much.
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Jan 15, 2017 20:46
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Drink tea with no cream.
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Jan 15, 2017 21:31
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A little bit of real world history here. One of the new Scandinavian leaders is Aksel Larsen, who was chairman of the Danish Communist Party until 1956, when he was excluded from the party. Why? Stalin, the whole de-stalinization process and just what a monster he really was, basically broke the Danish Communist Party, forever. Larsen would go on and found the Socialist People's Party, which is still in parliament today. I know this, because my grandfather followed him, from DKP to SF, same year. I guess in this alternative reality, the socialist paradise of Scandinavia is going to be even more Socialist!
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Jan 15, 2017 22:57
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It'd be interesting to see everyone scrambling to a cold war when the 1st nuke is unveiled .
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Jan 15, 2017 23:23
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RagnarokZ posted:A little bit of real world history here. Thanks for this, it's interesting, I've been trying to research the leaders of the new puppet states but I hadn't looked into the Scandinavian ones.
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Jan 15, 2017 23:52
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Peder Furubotn was the head of the Norwegian Communist Party and the only non-collaborating party leader to remain in Norway throughout the occupation. His protector used to be Bukharin, and he basically fled his work in Moscow when Bukharin was executed. He's notable for being one of the only comintern leaders to defy Stalin's order of cease-fire with the nazis, and managed to keep his party with its affiliated support groups active throughout the occupation - once it ended, he was quickly marginalised both by Moscow (for being unreliable) and by the post-war government (for being a communist) and ended his life as a bitter, defeated man in 1975 - his base of support lay in the organised wharf-workers and shipbuilders in Bergen, and the metalworkers in the surrounding towns, and eventually leveraged that along with his increasing status as a folk-hero to significantly reform Norwegian communism until his aforementioned systematic exclusion from any party-based political activity. Peder Furubotn was an interesting dude
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Jan 16, 2017 00:33
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Deceitful Penguin posted:Man, this LP is such a ray of sunshine in a world of liberalism. I almost wanna print it out and make it into a book or something. I honestly have half a mind to make a (fictional obviously) documentary type book on the American Civil War, just because I have so many weird ideas about why certain things happened in certain ways.
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Jan 17, 2017 05:44
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That was a beautiful way to remind us that the British army AI in Darkest Hour is bloody awful.
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Jan 17, 2017 14:49
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Really, the British AI in literally every Paradox game is awful.
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Jan 17, 2017 15:41
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Truth in television
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Jan 17, 2017 16:10
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Drone posted:Really, the British AI in literally every Paradox game is awful. - me, CK2, EUIV, HOI4
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Jan 17, 2017 20:55
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My favorite Darkest Hour story regarding the British was in a game as La Plata. I beat the Brazilians then join Mitteleuropa. I invade CNT-FAI in the hopes of breaking the German-French stalemate. After I annex Spain and establish a front line in southern France, I release the Kingdom of Spain as a puppet. Another three months go by and I'm engrossed in trying to smash Fortress Paris, trapped between German and Platinean forces, I suddenly see: KINGDOM OF SPAIN ANNEXED UNION OF BRITAIN Spain's Navy consists of three transports, and they have one of their six divisions present in Britain. I don't know if maybe they got the landing and some other Mitteleuropa member moved in to finish the job but I have no clue what Britain was doing with their army. AI Britain is always a fun time.
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Jan 17, 2017 21:18
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I do not understand how they mess it up even in CK2, where naval warfare is nonexistent and they literally just have to have enough boats to ferry them roughly near where they're supposed to engage in war but no, somehow even that doesn't go right.
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Jan 18, 2017 01:37
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My favorite is Vicky 2 where they ineffectually throw wave after wave of small armies and never surrender or white peace because of their unending manpower from India
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Jan 18, 2017 01:51
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theblastizard posted:My favorite is Vicky 2 where they ineffectually throw wave after wave of small armies and never surrender or white peace because of their unending manpower from India Christ, what Vicky 2 were you playing? Whenever I'm USA and fight the bongs I end up having to grind massive armies down, repeatedly, because Canada doesn't count for poo poo for warscore.
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Jan 18, 2017 02:32
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This is a great LP I'm glad I discovered it. Bit sad the HoI4 Kaiserreich mod is lacking atm though.
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Jan 18, 2017 08:46
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Mister Adequate posted:Christ, what Vicky 2 were you playing? Whenever I'm USA and fight the bongs I end up having to grind massive armies down, repeatedly, because Canada doesn't count for poo poo for warscore. I haven't played recently or fought against them recently because I remember every time I fight Britain it just isn't worth the frustration. The only time I can remember fighting threatening British stacks is when I'm a tiny unciv or when I was playing Panjab. Like I can distinctly remember a game where I was Iraq and they just sent constant waves of 30k stacks to die in the desert.
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Jan 18, 2017 13:22
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can alternate reality jeremy corbyn save socialist britain
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Jan 22, 2017 06:53
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Chapter Twenty Six: Petty Kings & Bourgeois Republics (Hungary & Bohemia: February 14 – April 1, 1944) This was turning out to be one of the worst Council meetings he had ever been to. Rather than an example of how the system is supposed to work, this was a prime example of what Joe’s father would gripe about to his mother all the time: “small-town horseshit”. Joe had planned on this being Sean’s first meeting, but he had gotten grounded, and the fact that this would have been his first made Joe think that was a blessing in disguise. There had been many acrimonious meetings in the past: the old timers in town still talked about the three week marathon session about whether to join in on a worldwide general strike until a War Crimes Commission was convened (they didn’t but the Commission was convened anyway) and there was a brawl during the meeting about whether to intervene in the War in Turkestan that resulted in Stout’s masterpiece landscape of the Navesink River being damaged. Those were at least important issues to fight and yell about. The issue today? Headlights. There was a two hour plus argument going on about how blue and bright headlights could be. The area had gotten too crowded for hunting and a few broken windows from stray bullets led to a district wide ban about five years ago. This led to the deer population getting too large and now too many people were running into deer with their cars, so now Bill Kelly’s auto parts shop was stocking new headlights that were very bright and blue which were supposed to help with spotting the deer at distance. The unintended consequence of these new highlights was that people were now blind on the road. All the usual insults and accusations were hurled. Only a Totalist would try and tell me what kind of headlight I can have, my mother/grandfather/cousin thrice removed didn’t fight for this! Hashing out all these minor controversies and dealing with the local lunatics was a chore, but Joe had to believe that too much democracy was preferable to not enough. After two hours of pondering Stout’s work (thankfully only one corner of the landscape had been damaged all those years ago), Joe had to find something else to pass the time. He had promised his niece he would be here for her performance, and Chairwoman Gibson had, for some reason, scheduled that performance for after the headlight debate. He rifled through his briefcase and came upon his son Sean’s school-issued tablet computer. He had to take it away from him since Sean had hacked the tablet to be able to play games on it during class. The computer science teacher had volunteered to clean the tablet up for him, but Sean was getting older and he might have been using the tablet to flirt with girls under the nose of the teachers. Joe had no reason to be suspicious of the CS teacher, but it seemed appropriate that if any adult should come across something potentially embarrassing, it ought to be him. Hunting down all of the games got tedious, and Joe was started to hope he would find some evidence of young love if only to learn that Sean had interests other than video games and annoying his teachers. Sean, eternally too clever for his own good, had given all of his games different names to mask what they were from the monitoring programs the school installed, so he had to click through every single one to see what it was. Calculator turned out to be a baseball game, for instance. Clicking on GlobeMapper 2.0 caused a familiar graphic to sprawl across the screen: a red star medal with the profile of a SOMUA S-55 tank inlaid in gold in the center, laid on top of a map of Western Europe. In a big military-type font across the top: Gènèral Du Char. Joe’s teenage years were taken up by three things: trying to convince his current wife Mary Ellen to go out with him, football, and Gènèral Du Char. Before he uninstalled this game, he decided to take a look and see how it had changed over the years. Joe clicked through the intro screen and looked through the scenarios. There were the classics that he must have played a hundred times each: Flanders, Rhineland, Torch, New England, Cascadia, Rocky, Sinai. There were a lot of new ones too. The Internet made it easy for players to upload their own scenarios. In his day, the only way to get new scenarios was to sign up for the GDC fan newsletter and write or call people to ask them for floppy disks of their custom made scenarios that they described in the Community Creation pages. Now it was all integrated into the program itself. The list was enormous: Andean War, Sahara, Mars… Middle Earth… Equestria?? Joe turned on the filter for Historical Scenarios Only and downloaded the highest rated one in the list: Hungary & Bohemia.  Scenario: OAS forces have recently crossed into Hungary, triggering the Hungarian and German armies to fall back, hoping to defend Budapest against the Syndicalist onslaught. You must defeat them and capture Budapest, as well as Prague. Capturing these two cities will open up a path to encircle Berlin and end the war. Good luck, commander. Victory conditions: *Hold Prague and Budapest before June 30, 1944 *Keep average morale above 50%  The game map opened up after he clicked through the briefing. The graphics had improved by leaps and bounds compared to the version he played all those years ago, but the essential elements of the user interface had not changed. A large Pact army was in retreat into Slovakia. Joe’s first instinct was always to try and hold chokepoints, and the strip of land between a lake and the impassable Serbian border seemed like a good point to try and hold.  Joe turned his attention to the border with Bohemia. The armies in that half of the map were all French and German, while more of a mix was represented in the battle between the OAS and Hungary. The French armor had low morale, probably to represent that they were coming off a mad dash all the way from France.  The numbers advantage was definitely on Joe’s side, which was probably the reason for the morale requirement. Without it, there wouldn’t be much challenge to the scenario. A cautious approach would probably take too much time and cause morale to degrade too far, but if he was reckless and lost major battles, then his morale would plummet. He had to think carefully about what he was doing. Joe had to capture important cities to keep his morale above the requirement. Pressburg, the old name for Bratislava, was a Tier 3 City, and would give five percent of morale across the whole front. That would be a good start.  Joe ordered the Abraham Lincoln Corps to advance, and deployed all of his available bombers into the area.    Syndintern won all of the initial battles, as they were bound to, given their advantage. More importantly, they were won without many losses, and the negative effect on morale was minimal once the small bonus for winning battles was factored in.  Finding a way to get to the enemy capitals without losing tons of soldiers would be crucial to win the scenario.  A strong line of French armor held against an almost as strong German line in the Sudetenland. There was one weak point, as the victory in Pressburg had isolated a few motorized divisions in Znojmo. Joe had a fresh unit of American motorized divisions available and a Medium intelligence level of what German forces were present in the interior of Bohemia. He couldn’t be sure that it was accurate, but it said that were no German forces in between him and Prague. The scenario would require a gamble if he wanted to win with enough morale to spare.  Joe decided to go all in.   Luckily, there were not only no Germans in the area around Prague, but none in Prague either.  Capturing Prague was easy for the rapid motorized troops. +10 morale for all troops. This was going pretty well, especially since he hadn’t played in fifteen years.  Gènèral Du Char usually punished the complacent, so he had to press his advantage. The motorized divisions weren’t enough to defeat the German forces they had flanked, but in combination with the French line, they might be able to help surround and eliminate them, and then he could blow this game wide open.  The AI probably recognized what danger it was in, as German units began to peel away from Slovakia in order to harass the motorized unit. Risking Slovakia seemed foolish, but perhaps the AI was coded to defend the route to Berlin, even if it wasn’t on the map?  Only Budapest was left now, and large numbers of German troops were coming south from Poland to reinforce it. Now was the time to go all out. All divisions bordering Hungary attacked. It would be best to push back that line before they could reinforce it.  The Hungarian divisions were weaker and retreated right away. The German troops that remained were the best on the map, even better than the French armor. They weren’t going to be enough to hold back the sheer OAS numbers, but their spirited defense might delay long enough for more reinforcements to come. There weren’t enough troops on the map to hold back the OAS force, but morale was creeping downward. There was still a big enough buffer that it didn’t worry Joe yet.  Until the message box popped up: You have 8 divisions out of supply. He had made the amateur mistake of forgetting to secure the flanks of a rapid advance, and now he was in trouble. “Bullshit!!” The outburst drew his attention away from the game. Joe glanced at the clock, he had been playing for twenty minutes. The headlight debate was still going on. Mr. Hogan had interrupted the proceeding with the obscenity. Hogan was, as far as anybody knew, the last surviving veteran of the Revolution in town. He had to be about 100, and he would tell anybody who would listen about how he went to join the CSA in Philadelphia with his brother when the election of 1936 was cancelled, and how he saw the events depicted in the huge painting over the council table, even though that occurred after his claimed date of departure. “This Council used to mean something! Back in my day, we would hash out our issues like men, not cry like a bunch of babies!!” Everybody was quiet out of deference, but nobody was really listening to him. Mr. Hogan was notorious for derailing Council meetings with his rants about how the Council wasn’t the way it used to be. He was right. It wasn’t. The reason Joe skipped so many of the meetings these days is because most of what was important for his work had been settled through email or been codified into an algorithm long ago. Joe wouldn’t say that the Council as an institution was obsolete, but it had certain been superseded in some areas. Hence, there was more time for this type of nonsense now that computers made sure there were enough flu shots every fall.  Once Mr. Hogan’s rant was over, Joe no longer felt an obligation to pay attention to what was going on, and so he went back to his game again. He began an all-out assault from the west to re-establish supply to Hoffa’s unit. Having any of his units surrender would be such a huge morale killer that it’d probably end the scenario.  As soon as the lines were re-established, Joe decided to resume the push. Hoffa’s unit could link up with the French units in Pressburg and encircle a number of German units.  Another event popped up: Bohemia has been defeated. +5 Morale Most of Bohemia shifted into Syndintern control, leaving two pockets of German forces.  The first was easy enough to take out. It wouldn’t be long before he could move all of his troops from Bohemia and finish off Hungary.  Still though, Joe was going to continue pushing his advantage whenever he had it. He had gained control of two avenues of attack into Budapest, and the game had always made it so that having multiple angles of attack against “hard” terrain types, like mountains and cities, would result in a much easier time.  Even though he had the numbers advantage and a large morale buffer, a protracted battle for Budapest involving this many of his troops could deplete his morale enough to fail the scenario.  “Son of a bitch.” “Watch your language!” Joe didn’t realize he had said that out loud. He had forgotten that some maps allowed for enemy troops to deploy from off-map. There were little arrows at the edge of the map that would flash if there was a possibility of troops deploying from that direction. He hadn’t noticed it. Prague has been lost. -15 Morale This was bad. He was now at a 53% average. He needed Prague back ASAP.   Once again, Joe used Hoffa’s corps to seize the city. The -15 morale effect disappeared, but the +10 morale from the original capture had expired, leaving him at 58% average. The blunder could prove devastating.  The Battle for Budapest needed to end ASAP. It was going well but morale had creeped down to 55%. He sent Rose’s troops into Miskolc north of Budapest. Already the Budapest garrison had burgeoned from 7 to 23 divisions, and 8 more were on the way. These divisions would certainly prolong the battle long enough to make him lose. With both battles going on, he was now losing a full point of average morale a turn. 53% The battle didn’t seem to be progressing fast enough. 52% It definitely wasn’t. 51% Would he fail going below 50% or would he fail if he just reached it? Joe wasn’t sure. He desperately looked around, hoping to find a way to keep his morale up for just a few more turns. He was so close! Then he saw an unfamiliar button next to the portrait of General Rose. Special Ability: Inspiring Leadership, adds 20 points of morale to all troops under command. Cooldown: 90 days That was a new feature, or at least it had been added since the last time he played. The feature might have been added when his son was born for all he knew. He pressed it and his theater-wide average popped back up to 54%.  Two turns later, and Budapest was his. Victory! That was fun. As Joe went through the stats of his run (including Historicity: 100%, whatever that meant), his attention was brought back to the meeting by the slamming of a gavel. “Those in favor of the ban do not have enough votes to send the issue to referendum.” Joe had been so engrossed in the game that he didn’t even realize there had been a vote. Chairwoman Gibson had been at this long enough to know that there would be some people who wouldn’t let it go even after they lost, and so she announced that the performance of the choir had been moved up to now. “The debate took longer than expected and these kids need to get home. Agenda setting for next week will take place after their performance.” God bless Mary Beth Gibson and her finesse. Even the angriest people wouldn’t try to shout over a bunch of schoolchildren singing revolutionary songs. He exited the game and dragged the icon over to the little trash can to uninstall it. He then slid the tablet into his briefcase and made sure to wave at his niece. She smiled and waved back, and then he sat back to listen to the classic songs every aspiring musician learns in school. As the choir started with The Internationale, Joe had to wonder if Pottier really believed that the revolution was the final struggle. Or perhaps the song was meant for this occasion. Race, religion and gender had been the easy parts, but once the great headlight divide was bridged, then the Internationale would truly be the human race.
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Feb 19, 2017 23:37
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quote:Equestria?? Well there goes any hope of this being a better world than ours 
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Feb 19, 2017 23:44
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gently caress, I want to play Gènèral Du Char.
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Feb 20, 2017 00:58
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Also, I have closed voting for the mini LP country. Japan won with 42 votes to Australasia's 38.
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Feb 20, 2017 01:07
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quote:Equestria oh dear god
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Feb 20, 2017 01:18
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I liked how that was the last straw before Joe flipped on the historical content filter.
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Feb 20, 2017 01:23
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GunnerJ posted:gently caress, I want to play Gènèral Du Char. It should be Général de Blindés  :shakefist:
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Feb 20, 2017 01:35
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On to Berlin!
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Feb 20, 2017 04:16
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And what's left of the Kingdom of Hungary!
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Feb 20, 2017 04:24
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My favorite part of this LP has absolutely nothing to do with the game anymore, it's really just the super interesting world CSM has built up around it. I honestly skip the screenshots and just read the narrative.
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Feb 20, 2017 09:32
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This last update's been probably the first I've looked at the screenshots in quite a while, because it's written more like a play-by-play. Otherwise, yeah right with you.
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Feb 20, 2017 10:04
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Everyone's here because of the writing, the screenshots are only useful as a reminder of where the armies are and what's left to
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Feb 20, 2017 10:13
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And interesting commentary on the "mop-up" phase of these games.
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Feb 21, 2017 01:27
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This thread had me playing some KR and hilariously enough, in my world the most free places in the world are the German and Austrian Empires. Australasia has insisted on remaining pretty open and democratic too, and Dehli has steered a relatively progressive course after unifying India. That's about it. Everyone else is repressive as hell, not least my own Russian empire.
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Feb 28, 2017 04:34
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I'm a little disappointed that Joe wasn't seized with a fit of nostalgia and decided to leave the wargame on his kid's tablet, even if he deleted all the other stuff. Ah well.
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Feb 28, 2017 05:32
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:I'm a little disappointed that Joe wasn't seized with a fit of nostalgia and decided to leave the wargame on his kid's tablet, even if he deleted all the other stuff. Maybe if it was part of the Coeurs de Fer series or its offshoots, it could have stayed. I really like these slice-of-life updates.
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Feb 28, 2017 05:46
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So I just binge-read the entire LP over the course of a few days, and good god this has developed into some of the best writing I've seen on SA. Absolutely LOVE all the creative framing devices and slice-of-life updates. Also, oh my god what did the Brits nuke and why did it piss off apparently everyone 
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Mar 15, 2017 04:48
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So I found this video of Reagan praising the Solidarity workers in Poland. Is there anyway (for laughs) that you can incorporate this into the postwar world? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8i--_CSLA4
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Mar 19, 2017 19:30
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Crowsbeak posted:So I found this video of Reagan praising the Solidarity workers in Poland. Is there anyway (for laughs) that you can incorporate this into the postwar world? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8i--_CSLA4 Reagan dies at the start of every ACW. The event doesn't make a lot of sense and is mostly an easter egg, but on the other hand gently caress Ronald Reagan.
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Mar 19, 2017 19:38
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 12:19 |
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Kavak posted:Reagan dies at the start of every ACW. The event doesn't make a lot of sense and is mostly an easter egg, but on the other hand gently caress Ronald Reagan. Should be noted the video is made by /leftypol/.
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Mar 19, 2017 20:32
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