http://harebrained-schemes.com/battletech/

It's pretty cheap right now but would like some opinions before buying.

Thanks!

Hey, so currently I am working on a rather ambitious project which soft limits units to 20 per tile (military only) on the field or 40 per tile inside a city.

I am also involved with a current working version of this, which uses Discord, Medieval 2 Online Battles, and Civilization 4 to create this de facto if not de jure.

In part, I would like to ask if anyone would like to join the ongoing version of this game on discord (only requires ownership of Medieval 2 total war)...



But also, I would like to ask if anyone has thought up of a script that would possibly create .army/.taz files ready to use in Med2 online, when you select a stack of units to attack another tile with units on it.
On the other hand, this would probably need a popup to allow you to then select more stacks to attack it if there were other armies you had bordering them.

Otherwise, if you had any suggestions of design or implementation, ie, of a Civ IV overhaul mod that makes it work within the framework of Medieval2:Total War, please let me know.
I do currently have several working versions, the most recent of which is being used in the Active Ongoing Game which is presently on Turn 4.


Some design decisions I made was to increase base movement from 1 to 4, and to have 3 production phases per turn (ie, each Medieval 2 turn, with the 4 movement, is equal to 3 Civ IV turns mechanically). I did this in part so that a lot of different things could be happening within a single turn, as due to player input speed and the need to fight out battles, we are aiming for, at the fastest, about 2 weeks per turn.


Due to the limited number of turns I also inflated most aspects of the economy, particularly food and gold, and I had Walls and Castles "Upgrade" the cities to be overall more productive and economic, and I renamed "Castle" to "Huge Walls". Instead I am representing Castles and Fortresses with different versions of the Fort improvement on the tiles themselves.

If anyone is interested in taking a look at the mod, please let me know. We are using Medieval 2 vanilla, no mods or dlc, because the vanilla version of Med2 has more diverse battle maps (from jungle to snow to desert), and in Med2 it is generally more stable to avoid using mods.




Now, while all of this is in good fun, a new project is possible, which effectively would be to create a new game entirely. One in which is on a more explicit square or hex grid, with the same limitation of 20 military units per turn (and possibly either 10 or 20 military ships per tile ... currently we are using 10 ships per tile in an attempt to make naval combat somewhat more interesting)

Effectively it would try to mimic the economy system of Civ IV, but redone in a way where less turns overall are needed, and probably designed to start with pre-made maps where most players start in Europe ...
And it would try to mimic the Rome 1 battle engine using units inspired by Medieval 2.

Ideally, since this would be a new game, special care could be made so that multiplayer isn't buggy, either with OOS on the campaign map or desyncs/ lag inside of a battle map.

Also Ideally, even if you were doing a Hotseat, when you 'initiated battle' you could save it as a 'battle file' which could be accessed by you and the other player in a separate 'battles only' lobby.
In this way you could meet up with your enemy to fight the battle out in RTS on the battlemap, and then save the results and imput the results into the Hotseat.

If there is a way to automate this process, where a Bot or something automatically hosts the battle and the two players just join using the passwords for their Faction on the Hotseat, that would be pretty cool. On the other hand, we would have to figure out a way so that the game wasn't "perpetually hosted" but was instead stored both on the User's computer and also maybe ghost-stored on the server, with a minor activation needed to 'rehost it' (to avoid over-using memory on the server).

If anyone has thoughts on such a project (either the hybrid option or the new game option) or is interested to join the project (or the currently active game) please let me know.

Well I wrote this up thinking that I might share this game in DG v0.7.0.16. I probably should have taken pictures along the way rather than thinking I might go back and take pictures by relying in save files. Also the format of how frequently I try to write something is wrong; rather than trying to describe stuff in 5 year increments, the time blocks need to be larger and more flexible as to whether there is anything interesting going on.

I recognize that this might be a particularly dry AAR since I don't have pics to include to show, rather than tell. Not my best work.

But since I wrote it up, maybe it will be interesting to someone anyway.

So my girlfriend is a bit of a Francophile and I want to surprise her with a playlist of French music.  A few songs to calibrate on her taste include “La vie en rose” and “Suis-moi” from the 2015 movie The Little Prince (obviously the French version of the song).  I’m looking for recommendations from native French speakers on songs, singers, bands...pretty much anything to help me in my quest.

Darrell

So between the Diablo 4 announcement and a bunch of threads getting bumped here, I picked up a compulsion to play this game yet again.  Starting a new project, going by the following rules:

- A set of 7 single-player hardcore characters, one of each class, aiming to complete Hell difficulty and make Guardian with each.

- No variant restrictions, all character builds and items and mercs are allowed.

- Sharing items by this rule: characters that have completed the same acts can trade freely among each other until beginning the next act.  (So in general, I'll play all 7 in parallel, one act at a time.)

- No mods.  No expanded or shared stash, characters keep and trade only what they can carry.  No realm-only ubers or runewords in single-player, or loot filters or anything else that's not part of the standard unmodded game of Diablo 2.

- No respecs.  [This rule was edited in later; I hadn't decided at first about it, so you'll see discussion below.]

- No repeating areas or rerunning bosses; each character makes a single pass through the game.  [Also edited in later after some discussion.]

- If a character dies, it can be replaced with a new one of the same class starting from the beginning, as long as the character build has some significant difference (roughly, at least two different maxed skills.)  The replacement character is still subject to the rule of trading only with characters that have completed the same acts (so solo until it catches up, unless multiple characters die.)

My favorite part of the game is arranging and allocating items between characters.  I think this structure hits the sweet spot of making that interesting but not overpowered.  Each character gets 7 times as much selection to pick from compared to playing solo, which should allow some solidly satisfying options but without degenerating into the known standard optimal packages.  And this avoids how I went a bit overboard with my hardcore stable previously, on item twinking and reuse and things like imbue/hellforge rushers.  Every item travels through the game once and only once; nothing ever gets sent "backwards" to be used before it was found, nor reused through the same areas/acts multiple times by different characters.  And the quantity of characters is fixed to set an ultimate endpoint rather than an open-ended sprawl of dozens more builds as I also did before.

Here's the list of character builds:

Necromancer: Standard bonemancer, my favorite class in general.  If he dies, the backup plan for a replacement is a standard summoner.

Assassin: Standard trapper, my next favorite, and was my first pure/untwinked Guardian.  And really hope she succeeds because the backup plan of melee with an assassin is clunky and dangerous.

Amazon: Javazon with lightning and poison skills.  Picked over a bowazon because those skills work with any javelin in a limited item pool, rather than needing to find a good bow.  But bow skills is obviously the backup plan, and actually twice over as either a physical- or elemental-based shooter.

Barbarian: Whirlwind and Berserk main skills, as I think is the standard best barbarian build.  All other barb combat skills suck (I'm not doing Leap Attack or throwing all the way through hell), so a backup would use the same combat skills while changing out the weapon mastery and war cries.

Druid: Wind spellcaster.  Like the javazon, that's the best build of the class to cobble together with a limited item pool.  Backup plan would have to be a melee werebear, although that depends on a strong weapon, and also on the bizarre wereform speed mechanics which I used to know fairly well but have now forgotten and don't want to relearn unless I have to.

Sorceress: I'm going with lightning/cold rather than the somewhat more powerful fire/cold because I think it's more fun (because Meteor is slow and clunky to use), and also to leave room for the fire as plan B.

Paladin: This one is the hardest.  This is by far the worst class for survival in solo hardcore.  He's fully exposed to monsters all the time: no summonable minions to hide behind, no teleport to keep away, no disabling skills like Cloak of Shadows or Dim Vision or Shockwave, and no big life boost like Battle Orders or Werebear either.  A hammerdin is obviously the powerful option on offense, but I've actually fared poorly with them in hardcore, the short range with a fragile character is dangerous, never made one to Guardian in about four attempts.  And there's this in the 1.13 patch notes which is new since the last time I played D2: "Blessed Hammer - No longer ignores resistances of undead and demons."  That sounds like enough of a nerf for BH to have trouble making it through Hell singlehandedly.  And there's no room for a hammerdin to do any hybrid, since BH/Conc/synergies need basically all your skill points.

The only paladin I ever made Guardian with was a Vengeance/Conviction meleer, but he had a pretty elite set of equipment acquired by other characters.  I hate Zeal melee, for how it spreads out the damage instead of actually killing shit.  Smite is slow too.  Maybe a Fist of the Heavens spellcaster, who can attack at long range, which is about all the safety a paladin can get, but blasting just one monster at a time is very slow later on.

Anyway, so far I've played the first four characters up through act 3 normal (really no point to bother trading items before that), and about to start the druid next.  So anyone got suggestions for a survivable hardcore paladin?

because apparently I lacked the experience and the correct mind set last time.

Dedlurkers are very welcome to support and remind me of mechanics and strategies, especially building military (like @Adrienier was doing)

Lurkers are welcome to enjoy, I will try to report better and more consistently this time.

Other players 

Stack of ships in attachment seems to have sailed aground. Wizard is nature/chaos, and indeed one of the ships got chaos channels flight, when I engaged. It does not show so when viewing the stack, though.

Attached Files

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I've vaguely followed a couple of Civ 6 threads since PBEM13 and there's a lot of stuff I don't recognise. It seems like there's been quite a few changes/additions between the expansions and patches. Hopefully I'll learn a little bit faster this time, with a better base to build on.

My first round of picks are Ottoman, Cree, Dutch, India.

At a cursory glance over the civs I'm leaning towards the Cree. Their bonuses come online earlier and in my civ experience that's pretty important. Depending on how long I have I might be able to play some SP to get a better feel for it.

Some jokes might not be apparent unless you have played on Bnet and pubbie games, etc. - Such as the warrior on Ep0 0:20 dropping book and flipping potions, but. Very entertaining. Watch the playlist.

I'm currently playing a game using Dwarves. I'm not recording it this time, mainly because I'm not playing much at a time and progressing very slowly. It'll probably take a few more weeks before I finish. Nonetheless, Dwarves don't seem to be too powerful and I doubt there is a need to play more Dwarf test games. They were reasonable in Sapher's game too.
So I think this will be a good time to start playing higher difficulty levels. I'm not sure if I should do Master first or jump straight to Lunatic? Considering all the balancing that has been done, I'm not confident in my ability to beat either as most of the things I abused to win are no longer possible, but I most definitely want to keep trying anyway.

Any recommendations or suggestions what to play? It can be something you want to see, or something you believe is powerful enough to beat those difficulty levels. (please do tell which of the two reasons it is.)