Jeshibu on 8/4/2020 at 09:00
Quote Posted by Thirith
What do you use to record games as well as chat, Jesh? I'm thinking that I may want to try and record some
Arma at some point.
Yeah, it's nVidia ShadowPlay's instant replay, which always records and only saves on demand. I have it set to save the last 90 seconds which is usually enough to capture any shenanigans.
I also have it set to record my voice to a separate audio track. This makes it so that I can boost/decrease the volume, or cut my voice when I want to in my video editor of choice (Vegas Movie Studio 13, though I just got 16). The only downside is that on quick clip rewatches in a video player you have to switch audio tracks on the fly to get the full picture.
Thirith on 8/4/2020 at 12:24
Great, thanks for the info. I think I'll play around with it a bit, see if it works and if I like the results (and the process) or if things need to be tweaked.
Thirith on 8/4/2020 at 17:33
Anyway, here's my first attempt at recording a game. Single-player
Arma mission in which I had to extract some units from a hottish extraction zone behind enemy lines. Nothing special, and if I was serious about this I'd probably edit the video down so you don't have to watch me fly around Altis for ten minutes - but there was a nice, surprising moment of action just after I'd picked up the dudes (just after the six-minute mark):
[video=youtube;J2cV01XiRCE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2cV01XiRCE[/video]
There's probably some weird view adjustments in the video; I'm using the Tobii 4c, which translates both head and eye movement into commands, in this case adjusting where I'm looking in-game. It's pretty handy when manoeuvring vehicles and the like, but for the sake of videos it also means that whenever I look at any of the displays in the corners of the screen, my view changes accordingly, i.e. I abruptly look to the top left or top right.
P.S.: This is the mission I was flying: (
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=489171976)
Yakoob on 9/4/2020 at 09:29
I've been playing El niño del Morta, which is Spanish for Dzieci Morty, which is Polish for "Children of Morta"
While the game has a great core loop and fantastic visuals, it desperately lacks variety. I'm some 5hrs in and STILL killing fucking bats and skeletons in caves. Is that the whole game? Perhaps instead of the egregious cutscenes they should have invested in some new tilesets..........
Renzatic on 9/4/2020 at 16:18
It gets a little more variety, but at 3 tile and enemy sets, it is pretty limited. Still liked it though.
As for me, I picked up The Return of the Obra Dinn for the Switch last night. It's really interesting, and is really scratching this detective game itch I've been feeling for the last few days.
reizak on 9/4/2020 at 21:38
I've been putting an obscene amount of quarantine hours into Bannerlord and I'm having a blast. It's still pretty rough in many ways since the full release is probably pretty far away, with lots of missing features and terrible balance, but what's there is a lot of fun. The modding scene is also already very active, so many issues can be gotten around one way or another. There's also been a patch every single day since release apart from last sunday, with a lot of improvements. The kingdom management is still pretty rudimentary, but the combat is a whole lot of fun at least.
My biggest issue is probably the incessant warfare, which is funny to say about a game about civil war, but once you join a kingdom that's all you have time for. The other lords are completely insatiable murder robots who never stop riding from battle to battle. I like to relax with a bit of trading or tournaments or bandit-chasing every now and then, but if you don't want your fiefdoms to get steamrolled you'll have to just focus all on warfare. There's also this snowballing effect where one faction happens to get a tiny edge thanks to some random issue and before you know it they've wiped all other factions out of existence and taken every city on the map. They've tried to dampen that with the patches and there are mods that try the same, but there seemingly is no reason for the NPCs to ever choose peace over war so there's never really a break from combat.
The other big issue which Malf also mentioned is (
https://www.reddit.com/r/mountandblade/comments/fw593a/the_extremely_bugged_math_behind_xp_gain_in/) leveling skills. It gets practically impossible pretty fast so I ended up just installing a mod to multiply my skill-xp gains by 5-10, and another one that gives more frequent stat points. They're fully tweakable so everyone can find a balance they're happy with while they're fixing it.
Despite all the issues I have a hard time tearing myself away from the game, which is just as well what with the whole lockdown and all. A recent anecdote: I figured I should get married because you'll die of old age at some point even if combat death is switched off and if you have children you can keep playing as them, so I browsed through the codex for eligible noble ladies, and the only one that didn't look like an Oblivion NPC was already married, so I did what any self-respecting bannerlord would and attacked her husband's army and captured and executed him. That of course made my future wife and step-children hate me so I changed their relation score from -100 to +100 with the developer console and suddenly they were all greeting me like old friends. This might seem like a pretty messed up thing to do, but in fact he was a terrible father and husband so they're just happy to be rid of him. I also had to change both our ages to 30 because we were both too old to marry; I was 40-something and she was 50-something and the game thinks anything past 35 is too old to get married, so now her children are older than she is. The kingdom I'm part of is in war with the kingdom her family's part of so every now and then I'll beat her children in battle but I release them afterwards so it's all good. Reconstituted families can be complicated but we make it work :thumb:
I've also rehabilitated an army of forest bandits and turned them into fantasy-Celtic sharpshooters that are definitely going to get nerfed at some point, so the constant warfare is less stressful now.
Malf on 10/4/2020 at 07:11
If you install the (
https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/118) Detailed Character Creation mod, you can customise any and all NPC's appearances ;)
I broke my main save last night after trying to install (
https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/12) Mixed Gender Troops, so my advice is yeah, maybe stay away from that mod for the time being.
A shame, because just before I'd done that, I'd used my copious amounts of influence to oust all clans but the ruler's, giving me 90% of the kingdom.
To do this, first you need to reduce the amount of influence every other clan in the Kingdom has to under 300, otherwise they'll block you every time you call a vote to eject a clan from the kingdom. And here is where you take advantage of their warfaring nature.
Every time they raise an army, it costs them 300 influence. The machiavellian bit is that it only costs you 30 to force that army to disband (the button says 0, but it's really 30).
Pretty much immediately after disbanding, one of them will raise the army again, so basically, keep disbanding their armies until they stop creating them. That'll mean they have very little influence left.
Now browse the list, find the asshole with the most property (who isn't the ruler), then call a vote to eject them from the kingdom. Nobody will have enough influence left to fight your decision. Just make sure that in the resulting vote on who gets their property, the ruler doesn't end up with it.
The delicious part is that the more property you own, the more influence you have, so the whole thing kinda snowballs :ebil:
Before I broke my save, it was basically just me and the ruling clan left in the kingdom, with me owning all the property bar a couple of villages. I'm trying to think of the best way to finally snatch the kingdom, and it probably just comes down to asking to leave. I had married his daughter, so I suppose I could play the long game to see if one of my kids inherits the kingdom, but sod that! That's
way too slow.
Of course, I would then have to go around the map re-hiring a bunch of nobles to help run the place, as while they're warmongering assholes, they do help with protecting the borders.
My first game, I'd gone independent and somehow managed to get a hold of a city without initially pissing off other people. I'd taken over a couple of others more through luck than anything else and subsequently brokered peace with the offended factions. But I think because I'd advanced the campaign story to the Conspiracy phase, my kingdom started sporadically declaring war against other factions. Either that or my asshole companions were roaming the map picking fights without my say-so; hard to tell.
The end result was that I was pin-balling all over the map trying to keep things together, but with no murderbot nobility to help me out :(
So I'm going to start a new game, take over a kingdom from the inside, then hire the feckless nobility back. What can go wrong?!
Oh, and if you want to make sure you end up with an army stacked with tier 6 troops, download the mod that (
https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/92) fixes the perk that lets you upgrade bandits, and another one which allows you to (
https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/112) recruit tier 5 & 6 troops from your prisoners (which is another feature that's currently broken).
Forest bandits can upgrade to probably the best tier 6 ranged troop in the game, the Battanian Fian Champion.
Steppe bandits can be upgraded to the best tier 6 horse archers in the game, the Khuzait Khan's Guard.
And employ all those Imperial Heavy Horse / Equites / Cataphracts you get in your prisoners list when they become available, as they upgrade to the best cavalry in the game, the tier 6 Imperial Elite Cataphract.
With such a mixed army, I've found I can easily defeat opposing ones 2-3 times bigger than my own.
You can also bolster your heavy cavalry with Nomad bandits from the desert that upgrade to another great tier 6 troop, the Aserai Vanguard Faris.
This way, there's no faffing about currying favour with kingdoms in order to get access to the best troops. Just capture bandits and make your own!
Edit: oh yeah, Sea bandits also upgrade to tier 6 cavalry, the Sturgian Druzhinnik Champion, and mountain bandits upgrade to Vlandian Banner Knights, another tier 6 cavalry unit.
reizak on 10/4/2020 at 12:05
That's hilarious :D I thought I was being devious with my matrimonial machinations but I guess that was amateur hour. I'm totally going to try that when I start a new playthrough; I couldn't do that to my current Battanian compatriots. Maybe I'll infiltrate those bastard Khuzaits and undermine them from within.
My army is mostly ex-con Fian Champions and Elite Imperial Cataphracts at this point, with the infantry comprising of whatever prisoners I happen to press-gang into service. Honestly it seems like I could just as well not have infantry at all with the way the other guys mow people down. I tend to not fight armies much bigger than my own though so I suspect infantry will get more important if the Fians can't thin the ranks enough before they get into melee range, although they pack a mean punch with their two-handers too. Some troops with actual shields might be useful though. Thanks for the tip with the other bandits; I've been wondering if they're any good but haven't gotten around to chasing them down (literally, because I can't catch them, I think I need to thin my pack animal herd a bit. I did download the (
https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/200) Slow Looters mod and applied it to bandits too, but went with the default 9% reduction which doesn't really help much when these mountain bandits are zooming into the distance at a 6.9 clip).
I have the perk and recruitment fix mods, although I found (
https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/186) this one which fixes a lot of others too so I think I'll replace them with that (EDIT: maybe I'll wait, reading the posts gives the impression it breaks as much as it fixes currently). I hope it doesn't conflict with my (
https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/19) experience multiplier and (
https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/20) smithing stamina mods.
Just installed Detailed Character Creation as a backup plan in case my desert flower Maraa dies in childbirth :erg:
demagogue on 10/4/2020 at 14:13
I'll crosspost this from FB. These aren't really games, just pure walking sims. But pure walking sims in nature are kind of nice right now.
------------------
If you're feeling cooped up, an Itch dev called caves rd has made three free walking sims for the PC where you basically walk around a great expanse of nature, one set in the Fushimi Inari Shrine complex in Kyoto, one in a forest in New Zealand, and one in a wide Iceland moor. Although it's virtual, it still feels very nice to walk around this kind of nature and take in the sights and the atmospheric music.
You can just walk around and explore and nothing else, but if you want a little interactivity, the game does reward you with a little bell when you find and take photos of a set of listed landmarks. So that makes it a nice kind of exploration game on the side. But the walk alone is worth everything. They're very peaceful & I recommend them to everyone. Good for the soul.
You can get them from here:
(
https://cavesrd.itch.io/kyoto)
(
https://cavesrd.itch.io/newzealand)
(
https://cavesrd.itch.io/iceland)