Crusader Kings 2: 247 hours later

So... my Crusader Kings 2 habit got a bit out of hand. In about 2 months it went from my least played game, to my most played game, with over double the playtime if my second most played game, Dark Souls. This has meant that I now have a greater understanding of the mechanics of the game, and am more equipped to talk about them. This post will contain some of the things I have learned over this time:

1) Higher Crown authority is not the end of the world.
    Kingdoms and Empires in Crusader Kings have a law that can be changed by the ruling monarch   that basically determines how independent the vassals of the empire are. On medium crown authority and higher vassals cannot fight amongst themselves, making expansion within a kingdom hard. Originally I thought this level of authority was boring, and tended to end my games if i didn't achieve independence before that level was reached. Now I realize that it can be the most fun setting, as you have to expand outside the kingdom via military force, and use intrigue and cunning to expand within, setting yourself up as 3rd or 4th in line and then assassinating those higher in the line of succession.

2)There are more ways to expand than just fabricating claims or holy warring.
   Originally I used this long and, to be honest, fairly boring method of gaining territory, and when I didn't I used holy wars which are risky and tend to wind up with you losing. Now I know that there are many other ways to gain claims, such as my personal favorite: Marrying your son to the third child of a nearby independent Duke. When the duke dies, your daughter-in-law will have a strong claim on the Duchy, which you can push, installing her as an independent Duchess. When she dies, your son and heir will inherit her Duchy, as well as your lands, expanding them out and giving you a large power increase.

3)Independence is overrated
   Sure, it might be easy to get powerful, then declare independence and win the resulting war against your liege. But where is the fun in that? it is much more fun to set yourself up as the power behind the throne, working in the background. Sure, you have less actual power, but if the king ever does something to displease you, you can just depose him and set his son on the throne. Do this enough times, and eventually they will get the message.

On reflection, after 247 hours Crusader Kings is even deeper than I first thought. There are many mechanics that I still had not learned when I wrote my initial review, and there are still chunks of the game I have not experienced yet, such as playing as a republic. All in all, I very much recommend Crusader Kings 2, and would list it as one of my favorite games.

Spec Ops: The Line

Spec Ops is a game I played a while ago, and was easily one of the best games of 2012. It follows the story of Captain Martin Walker, an elite operative in the US armed forces, and his team, as they venture into Dubai after an apocalyptic sandstorm has destroyed the city.

At first, everything seems standard, the mechanics and story being the usual generic Call of Duty style fair, albeit in third person rather than first. However as you venture further into the dead city, the story takes a far darker turn, fully exploring the horrors of war and the things people do when stranded away from home and civilization.

The best thing about this game is most definitely the storyline, which is well crafted and draws inspiration from the film Apocalypse Now, and the book it was based on, Heart of Darkness. Other high points include the voice acting, with Nolan North giving an amazing performance as Captain Walker. Graphically the game is amazing as well, with Dubai rendered in amazing detail. Finally, the level design is top-notch, not just presenting an interesting environment to fight through, but also managing to mirror the mental state of the characters via falls and hills.

Less positive elements include the gameplay, which is slow and clunky. However, to an extent this is necessary, as faster paced, more enjoyable gameplay would be counter to the message. Finally, the game has horrible tacked-on multiplayer, that runs completely counter to the games message. This was not even made by the same studio, and should be ignored entirely.

All in all, Spec Ops is one of my favorite games, and I highly recommend it to everyone.

Pen and Paper RPGs: Character Creation

On my last update I talked about Pen and paper games. Seeing as since then these have basically taken over my free time, I thought I would revisit this topic, so here is a description of how a character for vampire: The Masquerade from Old World of Darkness is designed and fleshed out, starting with the core concept and moving through the process until we are left with a complete character. For this I will be using a character I recently made for a game as an example.

The ankh, symbol of the Camarilla

The first step is to consider what sort of game you are playing. In this case it is an interesting format: A large, persistent chronicle focusing on political and social machinations in a single city. It especially focuses on a certain political organization of vampires called the "Camarilla." A full explanation of this group would be too long to fit in this blog, but to sum up: They are the closest thing to "good guys" the vampire world has. They try to not be inhuman monsters, though they have varying degrees of success in this endeavor.

With this in mind, you can build a core concept for the character. This is largely down to personal taste, and what sources of inspiration you draw from. Anything from films and books, to music and drawings, can serve as inspiration, and it doesnt even necessarily have to be directly related to the theme of the game, in this case Vampires.

My Inspiration was in the form of this Magic: The Gathering Card

A close up of the artwork from the card. I love how evocative this is: both artistic and cultured, and horrific and monstrous

This image gave me a concept, one that can be summed up in two words, the name of the card: Blood Artist. What is more vampiric than to paint using the very thing all vampires desire? It just so happens that there is a specific type of vampire in this games setting called the Toreador, who are a clan of artists and performers. Happily, the game I was joining had a shortage of Toreador and needed more, so everything was set for this character to be accepted in.

After establishing my concept, and ensuring that it would be accepted into the game in question, the next step was to begin building the character. As I mentioned in my previous post, the storyteller system rates all things between 1 and 5, and the character creation rules give a wide range of attributes and skills, ranging from the mundane to the supernatural. I took a lot of points in Etiquette and Expression, representing his cultured nature, and a few points in melee and dexterity. After all, he would need be be good with a knife!

The final step was to fill out a backstory. I went for a somewhat typical story, he was an artist who was turned into a vampire and began painting in blood. I also threw in a connection to a friends character who was established in my setting, he had a fairly wealthy character and so he agreed to be my artists Patron.

All in all, the character creation system used in the storyteller system is very slick, allowing you to rate your character between 1 and 5 in a very wide variety of skills to fully flesh out his or her personality and nature.

Crusader Kings 2: Murder, Scheming and Conquest Simulator

Crusader Kings 2 is a game by Paradox Development Studio, the same people who made Europa Universalis and Magicka. It is a Medieval Feudalism Simulator set in Europe in the late 800s to mid 1400s.

In the game you play as one of the Noble Houses of Europe. The aim is to maintain and grow your houses power in Europe, by claiming and taking land, sucking up to your Liege Lord to be gifted titles, and even declaring a revolution to declare your independence or put yourself on the throne.

Gameplay is mostly menu-based, as you navigate through screens showing the statistics and relative power of the various Houses and Lords of Europe. From here you can scheme and plot, killing key targets, enforcing claims on land, and doing any number of other things for the good of your house.

The simulation has impressive depth, nearly everything you could possibly think of can be done, and the satisfaction you got for murdering your lieges son and heir, only for all his titles to fall into your lap, is unparalleled.

Speaking of murder, you wind up having to do some quite morally grey, or even downright dark, things to survive. From murdering the King of Frances pregnant wife before an heir can be produced, to building a powerbase on a pile of bodies as you murder your way through the heirs of a kingdom you are 20th in line to the throne for, if you don't find yourself doing something you are uncomfortable with you are doing it wrong. This, of course, accurately represents the politics of the time.

All in all, it is an excellent game. There is even a multiplayer option, so you can scheme with and against your friends.

Pen and Paper Games

A big part of my gaming hobby consists of pen and paper Role Playing Games. These games have some interesting design aspects, as a large portion of the rules have to the flexible to allow people to act out their own plans and ideas, rather than perform a set amount of moves. I will be talking about two systems in this post, Wizards of the Coast's D20 system, and White Wolf's Storyteller System.

The D20 system is the ruleset used by the iconic game Dungeons and Dragons. It's basic principle is that in order to do anything, you roll a D20 (20 sided dice) and add a modifier based on your natural abilities and your practiced skill at the task. For example, if you wish to hide in the shadows of a dark alley, you would roll a D20, and then add your Dexterity modifier and your Hide skill. This result is then compared against the DC (difficulty class) of the task. If the result is higher than the DC, the task is successful.

Combat works slightly differently. You still roll the D20, but you add your strength (or dexterity with some weapons) modifier. Some classes also have an inherent attack bonus, which is also added. The result is then compared against the target's AC (Armour Class) to see if the attack was a success. Damage is then calculated by rolling another dice, dependent on the weapons damage expression. For example, a dagger is 1d4+2, which is one 4 sided dice, with 2 added to the result. there is an urban legend that the reason D&D uses a wide range of dice for all it's weapons is that they made a deal with a company that made the more obscure shapes, such as D3s and D8s. I don't know how true that is, but it is funny to think about.

The Storyteller System, used in White Wolf's World of Darkness and New World of Darkness games including Vampire: The Masquerade, Vampire: The Requiem, Mage: The Ascension, Mage: The Awakening and Changeling: The Lost, is a far simpler system. Rather than having an ability score for every possible activity players can perform, instead numbers are given for a set of specific attributes and generic skills. These attributes and skills are then combined to get the dice pool for the activity. For example, firing a gun uses your dexterity and your firearms skill, so a character with 4 dexterity and 3 firearms would have a total number of dice to roll of 7. All the dice are ten sided, and each roll that comes up with a number high enough counts as a success. The more successes you achieve, the more successful the action was. On the whole, the Storyteller system requires less maths, and the flow of the game as far quicker because of this.

Games, Gaming and Games Development: Crappy Flash Game Edition

Sooooo... Boredom struck, and I found my self playing some game called "Effing Worms 2." It is about as subtle as one would expect given the title. You play a giant worm. with wings. and flame jets. presumably from hell. or something, the story was not exactly the central focus.

Gameplay consisted of pointing the worm up to make it charge out of the ground, then flying, becuase apparently worms are known for their aerodynamic qualitys, and eating helpless townsfolk. Later on the army get involved, and things supposedly get harder, although I never had any trouble beating any level.

The game isnt exactly long either, I beat it in about 5 minutes, and once you win there is little else to do other than fly around and eat yet more villagers.

Still, it kept me moderately amused for 5 minutes, and that is all you can really ask for in a free flash game.

Here is a link, should you feel a burning desire to play this game: http://www.gamefudge.com/Effing-Worms-2

Warcraft: Orcs and Humans

Last weekend I felt like seeing how the Warcraft franchise started. Unfortunately, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans is so old, you literally cannot buy it new any more. Luckily, after a bit of googleing, I found a website that hosts torrents of games that are no longer sold or supported by the developers any more: http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/422/

Once I had downloaded this, though, I hit a snag. Warcraft: Orcs and Humans was made a whol year before the first Windows operating system came out. This made it impossible to run on a PC like mine, with Windows 7. Luckily, some more googleing found me an emulator for M-DOS: http://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1

However, being such an old system, this required a decent amount of setting up to make work. Luckily I found a guide: http://www.glennsguides.com/2008/04/warcraft-orcs-and-humans-pc-game-free.html

After all this effort, I played the game for about 20 minuits, realised exactly how much had been improved in the newer Warcraft RTS games, and went back to playing Warcraft Three. Ah well, setting it all up was good fun at least.