I really need to get my life together. It’s such a mess, all over the place. And my surroundings reflect that. It’s high time that changed, and maybe things can go into reverse.
Let’s start with my room (no, I’m not posting a picture). It’s not exactly like the picture on top, but it’s not great either. The trash can is full. I have a pizza box sitting there. Models have fallen off their stands, some broken, and they sit where they fell. I’ve got the box my computer came in still up next to my bed – where I put it a year ago. Though it’s kind of an end-table, as I have a bunch of papers and such on it. Like stuff that pertains to my surgery, that I had in September. Books and disks are still on shelves sideways, that I put there after they cleaned the carpets…almost two years ago. Everything has dust. My desk has all sorts of sauce packages on it. And so on.
My computer (where half my life is) is at least in a bit better shape. My desktop is clean. My Steam library is mostly organized. But some of my pictures folders are a mess. Sometimes I’ll create a new organizational structure, but never move the old stuff to that new structure, so I have stuff all over the place. It’s not too bad, but having to organize over a thousand pictures per folder is a daunting task, and not something I want to do when I’ve got free time.
And it’s not like I haven’t done it before, so I know of that which I speak. At one time I just had a Touhou folder. That got more than a little unweildy. So I went and organized it. Once it was organized, it was fine, and adding anything I missed just required a little bit more work. But I have it worse now, with some of what I want to do, than I did back then.
That’s just the thing. In my little free time, I want to be free, not work. And I’ve got time during work a lot, but then I’m at work, not at home (and honestly, I’d just play games at home, too).
Perhaps being more organized physically will leave me more organized in mind. Or not. But at least it’d be a start. And I could walk around without fear of knocking something over, or stepping on something.
Nomedas is dead, and now it’s time for Sergonis to take over. Sergonis is a pretty good sort. He’s got very high diplomacy and martial, and has good learning and decent intrigue. He’s also got just about every good virtue trait, and none of the bad ones. His only failing is that he’s club-footed. But is he going to let that get in the way of joining the warrior guild? Of course not!
Sergonis has a plan. Being such a good, learned, religious guy, he knows that his simple tribal pagan religion isn’t good enough. Sure, the gods are great and all, but the actual organization of the religion is…lacking. Like, at all. So, he wants to fix that. Trouble is, you need moral authority and/or command of the various holy sites, and Sergonis is lacking in both. Thus, it will be Sergonis’s life-long quest to take those holy sites back from the infidels, and return them to rightful Romuva hands.
One of the bad things about not writing notes: I don’t remember if this is a rebellion or just another kingdom.
Easier said than done, though, since they’re spread out all over north-east Europe. One is out on an island in the western Baltic, one in Riga, one is held by the Serbian mega-kingdom, and one is held by the horsemen. At least we’ve got one of the five, right? I guess all there is to do is expand, expand, expand.
Fortunately, Sergonis is good at that sort of thing. And he’s good at picking when the time is ripe…and just getting lucky sometimes. And relying, and helping out, his vassals. Powerful vassals might be a threat to their king, but they’re also able to handle things themselves, if you let them. So the kingdom is able to expand north, south, and east, getting close to double its size when Sergonis started out. And he discovers he can create a new kingdom (or at least a new title for his current kingdom):
The dynasty, and the people, have always been Prussian, and now it’s official. Sure, it took old Sergonis 20 years, but he did it. And he doesn’t rest on his laurels, either. Nope, gotta keep expanding. But he isn’t just a warrior: he’s a hunter, too. But when you’re that old, and not too careful, sometimes the hunter becomes the hunted.
Sergonis was a great ruler in just about every way possible, but he wasn’t quite able to claim all the holy sites and get ready for a reformation. Unfortunately, his successor Gauronas isn’t nearly the king he was. He tries his best, but unfortunately barely lasts a year, before dying in a war.
Gauronas is succeeded by Ulinniks, who is a perfectly Prussian member of the dynasty, despite his looks. No one really likes him to start out, and he’s not a particularly good guy. He’s also fat and depressed, and has an old wife. He’s on an upward trajectory, though, and keeps up the momentum of his predecessors. Well, until he dies too early.
This new fellow, Karatas, he’s a bit different from his predecessors. While they were all about the warrior lodge, he doesn’t like the fighting so much, not big into arm wrestling and duels. He’s got a big of a foul streak.
Yep, he’s a demon worshiper. Good ol’ Chernobog, all about sex, drugs, murder, and rock-and-roll. Perfect for Karatas. With his acting skills, he’s able to seem like the perfectly devout Dievas worshiper, but it’s all a farce. (Incidentally, this goes completely counter to my goal of organizing the religion, since the events lower moral authority. Oops.)
But besides all the orgies, secret murders, desecration of temples, and whatever. Karatas is a decent-enough ruler. He expands the empire more and more. But it’s not all about him, not in the wider world at least. For the first time, Prussia loses territory: not in battle, but to inheritance. While he wasn’t looking, one of his dukes inherited the kingdom of Austrasia, which then proceeded to blow up.
Fortunately for the world, Karatas eventually meets his end. He is succeeded by Ulitis, who is a much better person, if a bit dull. But he knows how to fight, and he is a competent negotiator. He starts off with grey hair, which basically means he can drop dead at any time, but he just keeps on going. He’s mostly able to fill in those hold-out areas, and expand the realm even further. But, being an old guy to begin with, he doesn’t last that long. Sill got more than a decade of being king, which is pretty good, all things considered.
In Dragalia Lost right now there is a new banner, and something not done yet. It’s a Gala banner (meaning limited (recurring) thing, and double SSR rates), but this time it’s a dragon. Mars, specifically. And he’s really damn good. This isn’t powercreep, it’s a powerleap. Now, honestly, I don’t care. I mean, sure, it’d be good to get him, since my strongest fire dragon is a SR. But, double rates for every other SSR are definitely tempting. Now, this is kinda bait, since we currently have a limited banner for the colab with FEH, and part two of that colab later on (the first part is a rerun from last year’s FEH colab), but I don’t really care about FEH at all. (I think it’s weird to collaborate with other gacha games, but it happens all the time so whatever.)
I also have a lot of resources for rolling, since I’ve been saving. Before rolling I have 126 single tickets, 11 ten-rolls, and 106,098 crystals. At 120 crystals per roll, that gives me a total of 1120 rolls available. Now, I did say I don’t really care about Mars, and I don’t. But I do have a lot of single tickets, and those will be annoying to roll all at once (since whenever I roll, I use those first), and the more I get, the more annoying they are. So, the plan is to use 100, see what I get, and post that. Just for fun, I’ll also post which ticket got me which thing, just to see the distribution.
But that would be boring (it’s only 100 rolls, and there’s no drama if I don’t have a target)! So I’m going to do some math. While I might be a janitor now, my training is as a teacher, so today I’m going to teach about probability, since we’re kinda sorta gambling here. The gambling fallacy is that, as time goes on not winning, that just means it becomes more likely that the win is just coming up: the longer we lose, the closer the win will be. But of course that isn’t true; each event has the same probability, every time.
HOWEVER, that doesn’t mean cumulative probability is the same. And it’s relatively easy to figure out in this case: either win (SSR) or lose (not SSR), so there’s only two possible outcomes for each event. But as I just said, what really matters is the cumulative probability. Sure, I only have a 6% (.06) chance of winning each roll (and thus a .94 chance of losing), but cumulatively I can figure out odds for any number of successes. The thing to remember is: if you say AND, that’s multiply; and if you say OR, that’s addition.
I just wanted a picture here.
Let’s just take the chance of not getting a single win. This means we just lose, right? .94 chance? But if that were true, no one would ever pay money for gacha. And of course, it’s not true. It’s .94 for each chance, but there are 100 events (in my case). So, the first roll has a .94 chance of failure. But the second has to also fail, and the third, and the fourth. AND. So, .94 AND .94 AND .94 AND so on, a hundred times. Multiply it all, and it comes out to .94^100, which is… .00205, or a 0.205% chance of not getting a single success. Sounds good, right? Seems you’ll almost certainly get your SSR!
Thus, let’s look at the case of getting a single SSR. That means you have one success (.06) AND 99 failures (.94^99). Multiply that together, and that gets… .000131, or 0.0131% chance. But wait, you say, how can that be? If the chances of getting none are so low, how can the chances of getting more than one be even less? And of course, the more successes, the less likely it gets! (Since replacing a .94 with a .06 only makes the probability smaller every time we do it.) Well, we only looked at one case – we didn’t say whether the success was the first, or the 50th. And that matters; or rather, it doesn’t matter which draw was the winner, as long as we drew one. So, it could have been the first, or the second, or the third, or… OR. Remember, with OR we add. So we have to add the probability of each possible group. Since there are only 100 possible groups, and each group has the same probability, we can just multiply that first answer by the number of groups, which gives us .0131, or 1.31%. Much better!
You can of course do this for the case of two SSR, or three, or any number, up to the total number of rolls (in this case, 100). The math to figure all this out is called binomial distribution. The equation goes like this:
P(k out of n) = n!/(k!(n-k)!) pk(1-p)(n-k)
Where the total probability P of k wins (with a probability of p) out of n trials is all that business. The first part is the number of groups you’ll get, and the second part is the probability of each group.
Now, this can be annoying to calculate out with a calculator, so fortunately you can easily figure this out in any spreadsheet with a simple command. Which is what I did. And doing it this way makes graphing it easy too. So I did. You’ll see I did two graphs: one of each individual case by themselves, to see which is most likely; and the other is how likely it is to get at least that number. The first one is self-explanatory, so I won’t talk about it. The other is a little more involved. Basically, it’s just another OR thing. If you get at least zero SSR, you’ll get zero OR one OR two OR three OR… so you add up each individual probability. Or, you can just do what I did, which is reverse it. Since the total probability is 1, you can just subtract the total probability of all the ones less than what you’re investigating from 1. So, since you can’t get less than zero, than the probability of at least zero is 100%. The probability of one is 1-P(0), or in this case .998; of two is 1-P(0)-P(1) which is .985, and so on. Hopefully your spreadsheet functions also have a way of figuring out that cumulative total as well.
How you all feel right now.
So I’ve said all that to come to this: according to the charts above, the highest probability of SSR’s here is five or six, though even considering all that, it’s still only a bit above 30% chance of that; could be less or more. This shouldn’t surprise us, since the stated rates are 6%, and so doing 100 rolls should get about 6. Indeed, if you had a lot of trials of 100 rolls, the graph would look a lot like the top graph, just smoothed out.
When I picked up that Lin You super early, I thought that this would be a pretty hefty haul. Then I went almost 60 more before getting another winner, which was getting me a bit worried – this wouldn’t be much of a post without a decent haul. Then Maribelle came, and I thought that would be the end. But no! Two winners in a row! That’s pretty crazy.
So, a total of five, which is completely expected. Two of them, Maribelle and Ariel, were new, so that’s nice. No Mars, but I really wasn’t expecting or wanting it. Might do this again, if the new FEH characters are desirable.
I’ve come across a problem in the way I do these AAR’s and other comprehensive playthroughs: I don’t remember stuff. My usual method is to just take screenshots of important moments, and talk about them. Trouble is, I get so caught up in the game that I forget to take screenshots sometimes. And other times I do take the shot, but then forget precisely why I took that shot. So, the story is incomplete, and a bit messy.
So, I’m going to do something I should have been doing from the start: taking notes! In a game like Crusader Kings II, it’s pretty easy, since everything has a date, and some of the stuff is even recorded in-game. Other games can be harder, but it’s all doable.
The main reason I haven’t been doing it is because of burnout, or at least the potential for doing so, especially in a long game. You see, I’ve gone this route before. Many years ago, I decided to do an in-character blog of a fresh Skyrim run, basically a journal of sorts. I don’t know where I got the idea from, but there it was. Like I’ve said in a post earlier, I got pretty far ahead in the playthrough, compared to where I was in the blog. And as I played, I stopped to take notes. Physically, of course (I might even have bought a journal for this purpose, though maybe not; I don’t remember). This was soon after the game came out, and I’d already played through the whole thing twice. Between the note-taking killing my excitement, and my growing realization that the game was actually quite bad, I just lost interest.
But that won’t happen this time. Mostly because “this time” isn’t a big long RPG playthrough, but individual games and campaigns in a single game. I might do a long report of some rpg in the future, but I doubt it. And it probably won’t be in a “write every day” goal-month. But we’ll see.
We’re going to take a bit of a break from the CKII AAR, because I have this idea now, and I’m getting further and further in my game from where I’m writing, which makes it harder to make relevant posts (this is the same thing that killed my Skyrim in-character blog, all those years ago). But I saw Krikkit’s post on this topic yesterday, and it made me think.
Thing is, many of my favorite games are a part of some series – but I don’t like the rest of the games. Fallout comes to mind: Fallout New Vegas is definitely in my top five favorite games ever, but I’m not fond of the rest: 1 and 2 are just not my genre, no matter how many supposedly great games I try; and I despise the Bethesda offerings. The Elder Scrolls games are similar: I love Morrowind, but the rest are pretty meh (and I have the hundreds of hours of gameplay in each to know!). But I’ve thought about it, and I think I can come up with five series I generally like, which have games I love.
The Legend of Zelda
I’m not the biggest Zelda fan, but I generally love this series. As I’ve said recently, Breath of the Wild is now in my top games ever, and Hyrule Warriors I also love. Ocarina of Time is perhaps the first console game I’ve adored and put a lot of time into. When I got into emulators my top playtime went to the various SNES and GB games. As I’ve said, I’m not a huge fan of the dungeon setup in most Zelda games (and many games I never finish, though I think I’ve at least tried all of them except for Skyward Sword, since I had no Wii or WiiU), but still, every new Zelda game announcement fills me with excitement.
Deus Ex
My favorite game, ever, is the original Deus Ex. This is pretty much the Platonic Ideal of “greater than the sum of its parts” – the game isn’t that great technically, or in story, or in acting, or gunplay, or any individual element. But taken all together, this is a superlative game. The sequels never live up to the original, but I don’t know if that’s even possible. Invisible War gets a bad rap, because it’s doesn’t even come close for various reasons; it’s still a decent game on its own, however. Invisible War was also good, but I think missed the point; still a game I’ve played more than once, which I can’t say about too many games. Mankind Divided is probably the objectively best game in the series…except that it’s only half a game. But besides that, great stuff.
Atelier series
This is another one of those series that get me excited every new game, though I don’t always like many aspects of any particular one. I just like the crafting aspect of it. There are so many games though, that any particular mechanic that I don’t like will go away, eventually. Or at least, there will be something else that I do like, that it makes up for it. And I love a game about cute girls doing cute and dangerous things. Even the PS2 games that had a male protagonist and tried to be a regular jrpg.
The Witcher
I love the lore in this series, and I love the games. Yes, even the first one. Perhaps especially the first one. I know it tends to rub people the wrong way, but I got along with its jank just fine. I couldn’t even get into the second one until after I played the first: it was the first that got me hooked, and gave the motivation to power through some of the harder parts of the second game. The third is one of those masterpiece games, no matter how much /v/ hates open-world games, and perhaps the best open-world game ever: I hate when scale is off for game purposes (because rendering realistic distances is a bit hard, even now), and Witcher 3 comes closest to realistic in any game I’ve ever played, while still being fun to play and having things to do (unlike Daggerfall).
Far Cry
This one came out of left field for me. I had heard these were pretty mediocre, and not too fun. Also, huge, with a beefy computer needed. Eventually I got one of those, and gave it a try. The first one, I mean. And I didn’t like it. Tried 2, couldn’t even get it to run past the first save point. The third one though, that was something special. Not only did it run, but it ran well. And it was a good, fun game. Story wasn’t that special, but it was good enough. Then I played 4, and that was everything the third wasn’t. And then Primal, which was super fun. And 5 was even better. (Not the new one though – super disappointing that they went the Borderlands route with the gameplay).
I guess the thing I really like in a series is a large scope, with quality gameplay and lots of random crap to do. I guess I learned something about myself today.
King Klukis Klakis has died, so now begins the reign of King Nomedas Klakis. The game here seems to think he’ll be a good army leader…and he is. His stats are about the same as his uncle’s (remember, elective succession means it doesn’t pass down in a direct line, necessarily), at least when starting out. Nomedas has a bit of trouble with the ol’ stewardship, which means his demesne limit is lower than it could be (ie, the amount of land the player personally owns). That’s troubling, but I’m sure it will be fine.
To start off, we’ve got to set up his initial things. You know, concubines, ambition, focus, etc. He’s stuck on Hunting focus for now, since he set this himself when he was an ai. We do get to set his ambition, which we’ll go ezmode for now: have a daughter (he has sons already). And since he’s a new ruler, and his predecessor hadn’t set any laws for a while, it’s time to continue increasing the centralization…but the council won’t have any of this business:
Centralization is good for me, less so for vassals. Plus, being a new ruler, they don’t like me. (This is normal for any new ruler, but especially for tribal governments – they want to be free, but will trust the ruler who’s established themselves.) And they don’t like me anyways. But that’s cool, we’ll just wait it out.
And Nomedas already started out with friends. Which is good, because when you have friends, they sometimes give you things. If you have the hunting focus, they might give you a puppy (a hunting dog). This is a great event, because there’s literally nothing bad that can happen (as long as you don’t name it after a demon…), and only good things can come of it. Unless you’re a jerk and reject it, in which case you deserve all the bad things that will come.
Nomedas is quite a young fellow, inheriting in his early 20’s. So he has some time to get things moving. Of course he’s going to join the warrior’s lodge, to fight some dudes (and dudettes). And of course he’s going to get it on with any woman who takes a fancy to him, especially if they’re not married already (not that that always matters…).
And the hits just keep on coming for Nomedas. He ranks up in the society, dueling folks and all sorts of other fun things. But he doesn’t just exercise his body: his mind is sharp as a tack as well. He even becomes a renowned poet!
All this exciting stuff, and I am sorta forgetting to manage his household. I like to marry off the concubines (they’re not technically sex slaves or whores, so people are fine marrying them) in their early 30’s, as both their fertility drops off compared to younger women, and it gives some of the unmarried kinsmen a chance to expand the clan too. But I’ve been having so much fun, and the kids have been rolling in, so I’ve forgotten this bit. Fortunately, Nomedas’s virility extends to all aspects of his life, and he even managed the above, which I thought was pretty much impossible in this game.
Being quite the virile fellow, Nomedas rises in the ranks of his lodge quickly, making it to Veteran in his early 40’s (in contrast, Klukis didn’t make it that far until his later 50’s). And in time, with all the fighting and drinking and stuff, he wants even more recognition. It’s time to join the Heroes.
If Veterans are old, Heroes are even older. And yet Nomedas isn’t even 50. And he’s fighting a woman. It’s not even close. Thus Nomedas becomes a Hero. There are serious gameplay advantages to this, which I completely ignore because I’m one of those players that sits on advantageous stuff, but never uses it because I might need it later. Oh well, it’s the thought that counts.
But all good things come to an end. Despite his incredible manliness, all too soon Nomedas becomes Incapable. All his enourmous strength and intellect, gone in almost an instant. (Probably lost in a duel, or other accident.) At 53, he’s rendered as helpless as a man much older, and his regent (and heir) has to take over. No, this isn’t the end of his gameplay, you have to soldier on until they finally croak. Unfortunately his heir is a really good guy, and keeps giving away the treasury.
And so ends mighty King Nomedas Klakis The Brute, warrior and poet, taken from the world tragically early. He accomplished a lot, expanded his kingdom, and had many, many children. Fortunately his epitaph forgets to mention the last few years of dottery, though it also fails to mention all the great amounts of blood and treasure he’s gone through.
Alvydas having gone the way of all the earth, it’s now time for a new High Chief (Duke). The electors find that Alvydas’s oldest son Klukis is the man for the job. Apparently he’s a pretty good candidate, all things considered. Alvydas wanted to get a friend, but he never did. Klukis, meanwhile, already has several somehow. And he’s going to get more, because he’s got some good combat stats, both martial and personal. So we’re going to sign this bad boy up with the warrior order.
Being in a warrior order means fighting. And with good martial (16!), he can do what his father could not: expand his realm aggressively. And he needs to, too, as he starts out at age 39! While the claim on Marienburg hasn’t happened yet, something pagans can do is just declare war on someone to get a single border territory, for no reason. This is swell, so Klukis decides to immediately expand south, as it’s exploding for some reason.
Also, expanding his romantic options. A wife and three concubines not enough? How about some lovers! And, if the husband finds out (or if there is no husband), you can claim the bastards as part of your bloodline, even without officially legitimizing them. While being a dirty bird does carry some negative reputation penalties (especially with the cucked husband and your own wife), as a pagan it doesn’t do a whole lot.
Expanding bloodlines, expanding the realm, fighting in bed and on the field, all this comes naturally to Klukis. Instead of becoming more feeble with age, like most people, he instead gets stronger and stronger. He even gets that stupid territory from his dad’s old liege, that dad was never able to conquer. Expand north, expand south, expand pants, it’s all the same to Klukis.
Well, that’s going to make family diners awkward for sure. Well, must not matter too much, since he does this at least three times. But hey, when you can beat up your son quite easily, what is he going to do?
But then I notice something…interesting.
Now, when I started I had no plans for greatness. I wasn’t planning on rushing to any particular title or anything: I just wanted to see how big I could make a dynasty. I know how tricky managing a kingdom can be in this game. But…I can do it. And without gavelkind, things are a bit easier. But the trouble is, you need to have three ducal titles. I only have two. The obvious thing to do would be to take it from the guy to the north, but you have to have ten years of peace before attacking again, or be labeled a truce-breaker, which is one of the worst general opinion maluses in the game (the only one possibly worse being kin-slayer). So, looking for other dukedoms…hey, lookie there, one right to the left.
Badda bing badda boom, Klukis is now KING. At age of 61, he is king. He didn’t intend to be king, it just kinda happened. But 300 gold down the drain, and he’s king. The king of Slavonia. Doesn’t really have too great of a ring to it, but whatever. Still the king. Even if he’s called “the Blushing” because he gets flustered and angry too easily from banter.
Even from his kid he’s educating, as seen above. While educating a child can make them friends with you, it can also go horribly wrong, and they are your rival and hate you forever. Not too bad if it’s a daughter like here, especially a younger one, but it can be devastating if your rival is your heir, or strong vassal.
But Klukis’s exciting days are mostly behind him. Sure, he can still get into duels with other old men (and women), win a drinking contest (which gets him the new title of “Bottomless”), have his wife die of old age, his second wife die (of a hunting accident I guess), get a young new wife (has a hairlip, but is a princess of 17, so that evens out when you’re over 70), and try to make up with your son you cuckolded several times, but instead he becomes a bitter rival.
Yah, sure, add another territory while you’re at it, but nothing major. Also, get PTSD and deal with it through debauchery, like your father. To the south are two big, scary kingdoms of Serbia and Bulgaria. To the east are a bunch of allied horsemen. To the west are some allied Poles and Germans. To the north…well, there are options to the north. But they’re kinda boring.
But at 70+, you shouldn’t live such an exciting life. While he might have won one last duel, it was still his end. Just ending up a drunkard, after all that good life, gets you the same epitaph as some useless bum. But hey, we went from count to king in two generations. Not too shabby. And he had at least 13 kids as well, all of whom outlived their father, so what more could a parent ask?
Whelp, time to get started with actually playing. The first thing to do is to expand. Trouble is, as a count, there are not too many options. You have very little money, and very few troops. And I spent all my money upgrading my money-making buildings, so I can’t buy mercenaries to even the odds. The best bet is just to look around and see who can be bullied. My liege is too strong. But there is another duke just up to the east of him that only has two counties (of which he controls both), who I can maybe take down. It’s going to be close, but if I can manage, I can double my holdings and maybe take a duke title right off the bat.
Tribal governments allow one to do a Subjugation cassus belli once per ruler lifetime (unless you have the Become King ambition, where you can do it as much as you want I suppose, but that’s a bit much for a count right now), for free. Since I’m not going to sit here waiting to get a fabricated claim (and besides, I already my chancellor doing that on one of my liege’s counties), we’ll go for that, and hope I won’t need it in the future. Also, I got a bunch of zealots from an event, and they go away if I don’t go to war within a certain period of time, so there’s a ticking clock. I invite a bunch of random dudes to my court to get a set of good commanders, and off I go.
Well, it worked, and far better than I had hoped. The enemy leader was personally leading his forces, and got captured. That’s an immediate 100% to warscore, meaning I win in my first battle. Talk about luck! So now the chief and his wife have new hats, and a new title. Now my old liege is a mere peer, very nice. I’m my own boss, and not even three years in.
And what luck, right at the same time the first new addition to the dynasty arrives:
Sure, it’s from a concubine, but as I said before, that doesn’t matter really, especially at this stage in the game. We’re not looking at maintaining a kingdom or anything; and besides, it’s the electors’ job to chose the heir, so no one is too fussy about relative weight of claims – the electors can just choose some random bloke in the realm (I’m not sure if it has to be of the ruling dynasty or not).
But now, since I’ve already used up my one Subjugation claim, there isn’t much to do besides sit and wait for my chancellor to manufacture that claim on my old liege. Fortunately there are events, and kids get older and such. Since my dynasty is so small right now, I’m going to stick to matrilinial marriages for the girls…
…Oh. That’s not so good. First daughter, already a mistake. Well, it shouldn’t be that bad. Love is for the birds, and a person has their duty to their family, after all. Lie back and think of England Sclavonia and all that.
Well, time gets ticking, and not much happens. Not strong enough to challenge the neighbors, and no one is messing with me either. There are events and such, but nothing major.
Turns out trying to make friends is hard. It helps if they already have high opinion of you, which is what I’m trying to do with this lady here, but you really need specific events. From what I’ve seen, the two easiest ways are to be a part of a society (you can make friends in the society, and in related interests), or to make friends with your wards that you’re educating (if you have Family focus, which I do there, because of the bonus to fertility and health). Of course, there are other sorts of relationships you can pursue…
Anything to keep the dynasty growing! Of course, it doesn’t hurt to get ptsd and try to deal with it by being a drunk and a lech. But other than that, not much exiting going on. Just keep getting older, randomly get events, and then die. Unfortunately, not too much expanding to do, since a ruler’s martial score affects the army size, and when you already have a small, primitive realm, there’s not much you can do. Until one goes the way of all the earth, at least.
But, at least Alvydas managed to do one thing right : get a darn good start with his dynasty. Eight children, all of which managed to at least live to adulthood. And his children are living on in his example of fecundity. A few generations of this, and this will be one of the grander houses in Europe, if not the world! But it will be up to his descendants, especially his oldest son, to actually make that house mean anything.
Time to start another AAR, this time for Crusader Kings II. CK2 is what I’d consider the last truly good Paradox grand strategy game, so it’s good to get back into it. My post about streaming/vod was inspired by this game, specifically Jon’s Many a True Nerd series of CK2 playthroughs. I guess that’s the point of these things – get people interested in playing them.
But I didn’t want to play vanilla. I wanted all the good stuff. So, that meant getting DLC, but the DLC is so expensive for what it is. Fortunately (or not, if you’re my wallet), they went on sale this week. I think it’s worth going over what I got; or rather, what I didn’t get.
Basically I got all the actual expansions, besides the three above (also got the collection of unit packs). “Sunset Invasion” is just a mid/end-game event series where the Aztecs invade Europe for no reason. I don’t like those sort of things, so didn’t get it. “The Reaper’s Due” adds plagues, court physicians, and hospitals…and not much else. It’s essentially just a difficulty boost – most of the mechanics are actively against you, and the ones that aren’t are just there to mitigate those hostile mechanics. I don’t have time for that sort of nonsense, that’s just not fun.
“Conclave” was the hardest for me to leave out. It adds another layer of depth to the council and law voting systems, as well as revamping the child education system. Basically it combines the council with the law voting system, and adds the fact that high vassals will want to be on your council (meaning you can’t just invite the people in the world with the best stats to your council, you have to use what you have available). This at least is not there purely to antagonize the player, as it also adds a favor system, to get people to vote with you; but you have to manage “personalities,” not just bribe people to be more favorable to you. But the thing that made me not get the dlc in the end was the education system: while it adds the ability for children to be less directly influenced by the traits and stats of their tutors, it also adds more rng to that system. That’s just annoying.
For this playthrough I want to try something a bit different from what I’m used to. We’re going to start with a count, in NE Europe, earliest start. That means starting as pagan. I actually wanted to start in Ireland, but they are Catholic, and I’ve already done a Tutorial Island start anyways. Catholic is just so boring. Pagan, and tribal to boot, have some interesting advantages and disadvantages – having unlanded sons is a big hit to your prestige, but you also have a very low vassal limit (because tribes are independent and stuff). As a pagan, you can have three concubines (well, as a male anyways), so that should hopefully help expand the dynasty, and you don’t have to deal with all that Vatican nonsense.
I know I said that we’re going to start as a count (with two counties because why not), but that says “chief”. They’re basically the same thing: count = chief, duke = high chief. What comes next depends on your culture group; where I’m at it’s king (spoilers!), but some other places it’s despot, or something else. So, we’re just going to go with this Chief Alvydas, a Prussian fellow of the Romuva religion, and a vassal of the High Chief of Pruthenia. The counties are Galindia (the capital) and Chelmno, which roughly correspond to modern Mrągowo and Olsztyn respectively.
We see here that this…handsome…fellow comes with a wife and two underage children. He’s 36, which basically means he can drop dead at any time, though it’s less likely than when he’s older. His stats aren’t spectacular, but (besides martial, which is kinda bad news) he’s not too bad either; I think 7 is considered “acceptable” in this game, and being above that in three areas isn’t too shabby at all. He has no parents of note, which makes him lowborn himself, but becoming chief gives him a dynasty. Two war axes for his coat of arms, very nice. But that means this is all there is to the dynasty. The kids are 13 and 12, I believe, which means they’ll probably survive, but this is still a hazardous situation. The wife is in her 30’s as well, which is not a good sign of fertility. So, off to Family focus it is then, since that gives a big boost to fertility, to hopefully get with the baby-makin. I also gave him a Get a Friend ambition, since there was no way I was getting any of the rest.
Now, let’s take a look at the children:
Oh no. Chaste is never a good thing. Especially for the son and heir. Well, presumptive son and heir: this culture has an Elective Elder system, where the various Elders in the court get to vote for the heir. I can live with that: don’t have all the problems of gavelkind, as one person gets all the titles, and you aren’t necessarily going to get stuck with a bad heir, as it seems the elector ai is pretty good about choosing acceptable candidates, for the most part (without the favor system from the Conclave DLC, there’s a lot less skulduggery involved in potentially getting a crappy ruler). But yah, that Chaste is a problem when the dynasty is only three people.
Daughter doesn’t look as bad. She’s only 12 though, still young enough to pick up some more negative traits. Got her matrilinally betrothed to some horse kid from out east, I’m sure it’ll be fine.
Now that we’ve got the children and council sorted, time to get some concubines! While Child of Concubine is a slight malus, it doesn’t really matter much in the scheme of things, and they’re perfectly legitimate parts of the dynasty. And, since mothers don’t influence children that have tutors, their culture and religion doesn’t matter either, so we can just invite young women from all over the place; as long as they’ll come to court, you can do what you want with them. But why search out girls when you have them right here? Apparently the Spymaster is a 16 year old girl, who is single. Eh, why not? Without the Conclave DLC, courtiers will just walk up and demand a position if their stats are even one better than the person who currently holds it, even if they just became an adult. But this girl is 16, which means she has a lot of childbearing years left. (Also, it took me a while to notice she’s not actually present in my court; as she’s out doing her spying job, she can’t do her concubine thing.)
One of the bad things about starting as a primitive tribal is that you essentially start out with nothing as far as your towns go. But on the plus side, you don’t need gold to build most things: you can use prestige or piety to do most improvements. Of course, being a primitive, and a count, starting with nothing means you don’t build up resources very fast. After building that market town, the tax rate for that province went from 1.8 to 3.6, but the monthly gain is .91? I don’t get how all that is calculated. But I’m slowly investing in the territories at any rate. But with this slow gain, I’m going to need to expand to achieve anything.
So, we’ll end with that. Nothing much has happened yet, but this is just the setup. Next time we’ll see how Chief Alvydas becomes not cripplingly poor.
Last post I was wondering if I would continue grinding out gear, or just go beat Ganon already. Well, I chose the latter. So now I can give my full thoughts in a review.
This is a great game. An absolute masterpiece. While there isn’t really any other option, it’s definitely worth paying full price for this game. Hell, it almost justifies my purchase of a Switch just by itself. It isn’t perfect, and I can certainly see why it puts off some long-time Zelda fans, but to me, this game is nearly ideal. If I had to give it a score, it’s 10/10.
As I said some posts back, this game perhaps most resembles one of those survival games that were super hot a few years back. I’ve played Conan Exiles, and this is very reminiscent of that style: not really much narrative (especially narrative pressure to keep advancing), but really you just explore and do what you want. Eventually it might be a good idea to advance the story; but if you want to get every seed, comb every inch of land and water, open every chest, that’s definitely a valid option. Or, if you just want to rush the main quest, you can do that too. Personally, I did it halfway: I explored a bunch, did about 100 shrines, got about that number of seeds I think, all the while taking my time in doing the beasts. Even took some time out to take most of the pictures for the compendium.
Personally, I am a big fan of this structure. Some folks aren’t – they want their bounds, they want that narrative push. They want that constant feed of story. This game isn’t that. You pick up bits and pieces of the story as you go. Pretty much all you are forced to learn is that 100 years ago Link and Zelda, along with four champions driving divine beasts (machines from an ancient civilization) failed to defeat Ganon, but the princess somehow managed to delay the final defeat until Link could recover – and now Link can fix things to defeat Ganon. That’s it – that’s the main story. Of course there’s a lot more to it, more to the world, but you actually have to go out and find it. Some people hate this, but I love it.
There is also a decided lack of dungeons. There are the four divine beasts, which are basically each a very small traditional Zelda dungeon. There are the about 120 shrines, which are each basically one or two rooms of a traditional dungeon. Some folks think this is very uninspired, and not particularly Zelda at all. I can see that, and kinda agree. But I don’t see that as a negative, since, honestly, I was never too fond of the dungeons in Zelda games. I really don’t like puzzles. I mostly like the combat and other gameplay of the Zelda games, but the puzzles and dungeons are not my thing. (I’m the type to keep a guide open at all times, to keep the momentum going, not stopped too hard by the puzzles I can’t figure out quickly.)
The biggest problem in this game, to me, is the weapon system – specifically the way the durability system works. For one thing, I could not see any indication of durability, until the thing was almost broken. This sort of opacity really irks me. This goes double when the absolute low durability of basically every item is taken into consideration. You really have no clue how long a weapon will last, and it of course will explode in your hands at the worst moment. And of course you have a very limited inventory, so you can’t just stockpile weapons for all occasions when whatever you’re using breaks. Against minibosses (and even some of the later mobs) you can lose several weapons, even good ones, just going against one enemy. Super annoying. Even the unique weapons will break, though there’s always a (very expensive) way to get them back. My guess is the devs were thinking that they provided the player all these weapons (you can pick up every weapon held by every enemy, with very few exceptions), so they had to give the player a reason to pick up all these weapons. Still the biggest annoyance in the game.
Second-biggest annoyance: white text without outline, so you can’t read it over anything white – the brightness is higher than portrayed in this shot.
The world is also a bit empty, even compared to other open-world games. There are some areas that are well-developed, like the Gerudo or Zora areas, while others are very underdeveloped. The world seems like it should have more than the two hundred or so NPCs that seem to exist outside of those two places. Indeed, the world seems half-finished. The Rito and Goron cities in particular, despite being associated with divine beasts, are like an afterthought compared to the other two “ethnic” towns. The Hylians don’t fare better: Kakkario Village is a proper town, but the rest are just small outposts, and one town so forgotten it isn’t even on the map. It would have been nice for these places to have been fleshed out.
But other than those complaints, I have to say this is one of my most favorite games I’ve ever played. I wasn’t expecting something so great, despite the great reviews (basically no reason to trust professional reviewers, and most people don’t share my taste anyhow), because all the complaints I heard were pretty consistent (which I agree with, if not to the same degree). To be sure, this is my new favorite Zelda game. I’m really surprised that two new additions to my top five Zelda games were on the Switch; if I knew it would be this way, I would have gotten one a long time ago. Neither is a traditional Zelda game, but they are made with the usual Zelda heart and soul (and skill), and that’s what endears them to me.
Dating Sims on the Holodeck 