Messages

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Announcements / Re: 0.5.5.0: you to decide

« on: March 07, 2019, 03:46:43 pm »

Well, thole whole interesting post gets fucked with one last sentence.

Eh, I know it sounds negative/harsh. Honestly I'm not really criticizing though - I'm truly amazed by your efforts and the ground you've covered in a short time. Just trying to offer a different perspective, since I know that it's easy to get bogged down in relatively trivial details and wonder why it feels like pushing against the tide.

I think atm, specifically paying attention to making it a better small pop. experience is going to give better immediate results than trying to make it a better general experience.

Such posts look more like "I have nostalgia, now I'm bored and have no motivation to play, entertain me". And I have a simple response: help with it. I will gladly accept your help in any useful form (besides money, I don't touch that topic). We lack pretty much everyone, if you're capable in anything - you can help.

I certainly don't have any expectation that you'll turn it into something I want to play and even if you do somehow make it great again, I don't have the time to be active these days. Just giving my two cents, since as an outsider, there seem to be some glaring problems and I do wish you the best.

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Announcements / Re: 0.5.5.0: you to decide

« on: March 05, 2019, 12:57:38 am »

What was fun to you was also game ruining for others.

cRPG has never been balanced around small groups. And balancing was always made for large groups, that's why ranged had that amount of ammo etc.

And also specify what you mean by saying "original crpg" because cRPG had 100+ simultaneous online players since Summer of 2010.

Yeah, I probs started playing in early 2010, so I remember most of that. The iterations before the upkeep patch weren't earth shatteringly impactful. That patch, however, changed it from a long grind c-rpg to a short session beatemup with mild G8+ rpg references. Long grind c-rpgs are way better at building (and keeping) community, but donkeys wanted to try something else, with Strategus as the centrepiece. They needed to shut down old cRPG and replace it under the same, so that they could use the community as a playerbase, but these were basically two different games, using the same assets and branding.

chadz once brought up that he realised that this wouldn't work universally and was killing the smaller communities and was toying with the idea of re-releasing old cRPG, but felt he would have to release the code to the public, since donkeys didn't have time to manage two projects. However, doing this would mean that he couldn't control where official pre-upkeep cRPG servers were hosted, so they could pop up in regions that had a healthy pop and leech a large % of the upkeep cRPG playerbase. For this reason, nothing happened.

YOU have time though, daveUKR! YOU seem NICE! Honestly idk that it would even help now, but it would have to have a better chance than what we've got now, which seems like just inane lv 35 circlejerk hangouts with no real motivation to play. I have something like 20 highish level characters and much as I love cRPG, I want to play it right now like I want a hole in the head, so good luck getting new players with minor tweaks and balance.

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Announcements / Re: 0.5.5.0: you to decide

« on: March 02, 2019, 10:40:04 am »

Ty reply. Interesting to see some stuff in the works.

I think original crpg was really fun for small groups, but the mod grew and modern crpg is honed toward much larger groups... which I think everyone is aware, can no longer be viewed as sensible at this stage. I really hope you can shift the balance back toward a good small group experience, which is what it needs if it's going to survive at all.

If people are asking for a wipe, I don't think it would do anything with gold and xp pouring in as they do atm. Peasant era only lasted more than a day because of the old slow grind system.

Ladders are back to battle servers, though ladderpulting isn't. Although it might be fun but it was an obviously ugly mechanic code-wise.

Players don't care what the code looks like, it was great! I can see in the shop a bunch of new off-beat weapons that remind me of BoaS, but nothing can compare with the mechanical hilarity of the ladderpault. Players would stay up late trying to make the tincans fly. It was a golden age.

(click to show/hide)

visitors can't see pics , please register or login

welcome to Strategus.

Is Strategus even viable with this few players? Oceania requested a server when we had more than the current world population and were declined. It does seem like a symptom of that "aim big" mentality that's just not really appropriate with numbers as low as they seem to be, though I appreciate that some people are probably only playing at all because of more personal Strategus sunk cost.

Also, tbh, much as I like random plains over some of the crpg maps, what the game really needs is more arena sized maps. It's bonkers having to walk a mile for a 5v5.

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Announcements / Re: 0.5.5.0: you to decide

« on: March 01, 2019, 01:07:59 am »

Absent for a while, maybe this has already been implemented? Otherwise, my vote is reverse the whole mod to pre-upkeep patch, with the ladderpaulting, the xp leeching circles and good times etc~

Carried over

Ladderpaulting
Kill for tiny amounts of xp/gold
Fast and weak horses
Native lancing angles
Peasant wars
Random Plains
BoaS, LTA, LoC, SoT, SoC and heaps of other nice items

Not carried over

None of the above
Especially wpf requirements and free xp/gold for noobs

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cRPG Technical problems / get_shader failed for: envmap_shader_normal_bump

« on: February 28, 2019, 03:21:51 pm »

I dinnae have that shader. As a result, game crashes during startup. I've tried repairing and running from WB launcher, but, oh woe, it's no use.

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General Discussion / Re: AU cRPG is BACK

« on: February 28, 2019, 11:49:39 am »

[21:47:24] Downloading Textures/donkey_mount__armor_n.dds

How did SIXTEEN AU players DL this on such short notice?

May drop by in a couple of days if mod isn't dead.

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General / Re: Dev Blog #5 Combat

« on: February 21, 2016, 11:10:02 pm »

Something we've been talking about for a long time when it comes to the combat, is the concept of commitment. Once you've decided your action, you cannot retract, you are by designed forced to complete it. This goes through the entire spectrum of combat. A decision matters, and has consequences.

This is spooky. Are you saying feinting could be out?

The reason we have stamina is to govern the combat mechanics we have. We did not introduce it for realism, but as a way for the player to control the gameplay. What we have now is a framework, the exact values will come from a lot more game testing.

Want to elaborate? It seems like stamina will almost by definition restrict gameplay decisions, since less is possible when under its effect.

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General / Re: Dev Blog #5 Combat

« on: February 21, 2016, 04:15:38 am »

I don't understand your problem with sprinting. It is not like ranged kiting was never a problem in cRPG. With sprinting added it would be exactly the same, only both sides can choose when to speed up. Stop pretending like Warband has a well thought-out movement system when it comes to kiting. Putting up your shield to block a single missile slows you down to a crawl, and then it takes 3 seconds before you reach full speed again, it is terrible. The only way they fixed it in Warband multiplayer is by giving the archer classes 0 athlethics. Even if this game would just allow fast movement while holding your shield up it would already be miles ahead in kiting prevention mechanics relative to Warband. Additionally you could make drawing a bow or reloading a crossbow cost a significant amount of stamina, so that you can never load your weapon and run away with a full bar.

Don't get your "low stamina isn't realistic" point at all either. I am pretty sure everybody who has done any physical activity is entirely familiar with muscle fatigue or being out of breath, making it difficult to control your movements, run or do any heavy lifting.

I'm quite sure that some people who've had to fight for their life wouldn't equate the experience with going for a run or lifting weights in any way. That said, everybody is different. That's the heart of why this kind of stamina system can never cater to everyone even if it could miraculously emulate how one person would react, which it can't.

You don't have to hold your shield up when the archer is running away and actively blocking with a shield isn't the only defense available to you in M&B. Your logic isn't. That said, group kiting in M&B is quite possible in some situations and can be very tedious. If you can imagine that amplified by the facts that by a. the enemy can achieve an extremely safe and unassailable distance to resume their attack within a few seconds and b. by giving chase, you are draining all of your stamina and you'll have to rest for some time at a disadvantage before you can think about chasing a second kiting archer.

That's not even the main problem with sprinting though. It's the fact that managing your stamina and sprinting around to gank people will be a more important skill than anything you do when you get there. If you've played WotR you might have a picture of what that looks like in a melee combat game and the type of play that it encourages.

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General / Re: Dev Blog #5 Combat

« on: February 21, 2016, 12:25:20 am »

If you watched any of the bannerlord devblogs, you would notice that they too have added sprinting. Can you sprint in real life? I'm sure you could if someone was trying to kill you.

For stamina- maybe stamina could only be drained by bad blocks, sprinting, and heavy attacks, so that players can use normal attacks without too much penalty. Also since it's a RPGish game, will you be able to increase a characters stamina?

If Bannerlord has sprinting, that's its problem.

A medical specialist recently told me that nobody understands what really causes exhaustion irl. It can't be measured and is pretty much a complete mystery. A doctor can not tell if a person feels tired. It seems like tiredness can be sort of crudely bypassed with adrenaline etc, but even those parts of the system that are somewhat understood work very organically and can't be properly simulated by people who actually know what they're doing. For that reason, when a character breaks down from "low stamina" in-game, the player can't relate to it, because the player would not behave in a remotely similar way in the same situation. Now, the player would also not behave in the same way as someone with endless energy and vigour, but that difference is quiet whereas being affected by "low stamina" will certainly draw your attention to the disconnect. Long story short: stamina in games does not approach realism and is unimmersive.

Maybe if you're a robot that wants to know what it feels like to be a human, it's a different story, but as a human, it feels robotic and forced.

That's realism out of the way, but realism isn't my gripe with it, gameplay is. In a game where player A and player B are to shoot each other from any range, sprinting is a good feature. In a game where player A must be at the same position as player B to prevail, it is not a good feature. Imo it's a feature that could turn out to be a defining feature of the game and not in a good way.

Remember that irl, most of the losers escaped most battles completely unscathed. A lot of front line soldiers didn't see combat. That's not the game we want to play.

Warband has a lot of things wrong with it, but the approach in making it was first and foremost, to have a competitive multiplayer game and in that, it was successful. I want to know if that is a goal here. If it is, I don't know how the team thinks that goal will be achieved around the problems that we've pointed out.

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General / Re: Dev Blog #5 Combat

« on: February 20, 2016, 12:58:01 am »

...
It sounds like this combat is geared towards duelling type gameplay and not the hectic situations of a battle environment.
...

I got the same initial impression as well.

Glad I'm not the only one immediately struck by how lame this sounds for any scenario with three or more players: both the stamina and the stance system.

Don't get me wrong, the system is impressive and I can see a lot of thought has gone into it, but I get the impression that the thought has been 100% looking at 1v1 situations. Maybe I've misunderstood, but if you have to change stance to parry every direction of attack and there's a delay to change stance, it only takes two people using different stances to easily destroy you with nothing you can do about it. In this light, it's easy to see how sprinting (to and from ganks), even if it restricts your viability in a 1v1, will be the main game here, not any sort of combat proficiency.

The stamina system also just generally rewards and excuses players for hanging back and cherry-picking (read: leeching, delaying) instead of participating, even if that's mitigated by basic combat not being slowed by low stamina. I have a similar concern about equipment breakage, which was mentioned in the video. It sounds like doing the right thing in combat still punishes you by slowly draining your stamina; will the same thing be true of equipment damage or will only incorrect actions damage equipment?

When you add ranged combat into the equation, if you get to a nest of archers, they will immediately disperse with sprint and shoot you from all directions. There's a good reason sprinting isn't in M&B. It just isn't a good feature for this sort of game.

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General / Re: Dev Blog #4 Battle Maps

« on: February 18, 2016, 05:24:26 am »

Does conquest not still revolve around resources and building? I guess that's disappointing, since the "Age of Empires" concept sounded fun and was solid gold from a marketing perspective.

I think the reinforcement system would make the most sense if only connected zones count toward tickets and you can only spawn at an edge that is controlled and connected. As well as being realistic in terms of a supply chain, being able to spawn at the edges even adjacent to enemy territory balances out the long path, offering quicker reinforcements, vs the short path, which offers more strategic choice.

How will teams be protected from feeders? Will everyone have access to the whole supply of team tickets or will supply be distributed fairly or managed to favour certain types of play?

Have you thought about making a random map generator for conquest? In the video it looks like you want to take a boardgame approach where the maps are built on the same template, but I feel like maps get boring faster in point capture games and it's important to have variety in the way the zones are set up.

Jacko mentions that conquest maps need to be more open than other types of map. Why is that?

Great to hear you're focused on realistic combat, I really didn't expect you'd try to make big changes on that front, but it sounds conceptually promising and I can see you've done a lot of work there. I hope it works out in-game.

I'm a little concerned that cavalry combat is being implemented after infantry combat rather than growing organically alongside, since after you feel you've perfected infantry, you might be reluctant to make necessary changes.

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General / Re: Your wishlist for melee (weapons 'nd armor)

« on: February 18, 2016, 03:53:43 am »

Original backers get an item in-game, so we don't have to wish, we can just have.

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General / Re: Dev Blog #2 What is Melee?

« on: November 25, 2015, 12:02:05 am »

On the other hand, are there really people in the world who don't like Age of Empires?

(which brings me to another question)

Is there still going to be a "stronghold" mode, or is the team going more for a single integrated experience?

(and here's one more for good luck)

If there's going to be some complicated server system, will it be simple and inexpensive enough for half-witted players to host mods with similar scope to the main game or are the mods we see likely to be more like M&B multi mods?

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General / Re: Complete control over your weapon - combat mechanics overhaul suggestion

« on: November 24, 2015, 03:23:51 am »

Your gif is too slow for me, I couldn't sit through it.

Text walkthrough seemed to explain a system that can do some of the things that the current system can do, but nothing that it can't do. This left me nonplussed.

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General / Re: Dev Blog #2 What is Melee?

« on: November 23, 2015, 03:54:12 am »

Will everyone be on one big map or will regional servers be isolated?

Will there be an in-game map and if so, what will be visible on it?

Can I attack an enemy town without sending an army, just by walking there?

Can armies attack things other than towns?

Will fortification take significant effort or will any city easily be able to build towering walls around every outlying farm?

Will quality vary within a resource deposit?

How easy will it be to determine the quality of a resource?

Will players try to run hundreds of afk farming families at once, or will they require too much management to be useful?