Topic: I hate Creative Assembly (Read 3624 times)

Yes, except there is an alternative to both DSL, satellite and cell conglomerates which deal in both data and voice. A wireless mesh infrastructure utilizing WiFi signals (traditionally 2.4GHz, though most wireless ISP providers opt for 600-900MHz) can utilize both low frequencies and mid frequencies (4G uses a significantly higher frequency than 3G).

The trouble there is that you're pretty much stuck with 2.4GHz, 5GHz, or 600-900MHz. Most everything in between is privately owned, and forbidden from use by the public. 600-900MHz can provide something like 2-5mbps per connection, and is able to penetrate many obstructions (except hills and thick forest). 2.4GHz can provide speeds comparable to ADSL, but it can't penetrate trees. There is probably an ideal compromise frequency, but since it's privately-owned, we'll probably never know.

Since in the 2-5mbps (600-900MHz) range, you have to either beam multiple connections to one house for ADSL speeds, this is extremely cost-inefficient. 2.4GHz is more promising, but it really only works in flat farmland which has been cleared of trees. Desert is another fantastic place where 2.4GHz and even 5GHz signals could live, but unfortunately, I'm in a forested area.

However, there's still some hope of existing in the Digital Age without ADSL, and it comes in the form of balloons, which is why Google's recently-announced foray into this sector is extremely important. Balloons can fly high in the air (but not crazy-far-out like satellites) and broadcast a 2.4GHz or 5GHz signal without nearly as much signal penetration issue (since the signal is more vertical than horizontal in a high-up balloon -- towers are very tall because they're trying to avoid having to go through a bunch of terrestrial obstructions, but this isn't particularly effective since it's very costly to build them high enough to be more likely to send a signal somewhere and have it be at a vertical-enough angle where it's not having to deal with a bunch of trees and hills). Balloons may or may not be the holy grail in getting higher-frequency signals from central locations to a home without costly landlines.

Well-designed solar balloons may be able to stay in the skies for months or even years, but there's an issue in having the balloon not blow far away. It may be possible to solve this with complex tethering (I'd consider this a kludgey solution, though I think it likely to be the most cost-effective if you hold enough land for it not to blow into others' land). Google's taking a different route, trying to control the balloon's location through active propellants, more like a spacecraft. The balloons would be equipped with a computer which keeps track of its GPS position, and appropriately engages thrust when it goes off-course. If their experiments prove successful, the era of towers may be near its end, replaced with high-flying routers and satellites. (This'd be extra-super cool if technicians maintained these by floating up to the balloon [or in the tethered solution, by scaling the rope], instead of bringing the balloon down to them)

ETA: I thought about scaling high-guage fishing wire tethers a little bit more. That wouldn't be awesome. That would suck.

Well that sucks

There are essentially two Satellite ISP providers in the US. There's Hughesnet (and their subleasing partner, DishNet/Dish), and WildBlue (and their subleasing partner, Exede/DirecTV).

WildBlue has the same issues as Hughesnet with reliability, because at least in the US, they both use extremely high GHz signals (40GHz, I believe) which are just barely able to penetrate dust particles (compared to 3g and 4g, which use very low frequency signals, allowing even significant forest penetration). Latency is the same issue with both - they're both sending signals an extremely long distance -- the high frequency helps, but there's no getting around latency hurdles of beaming something out to space, back to a terrestrial tower, and then through traditional ground infrastructure. In the US, they're trying to advertise the new satellite ISP technology as being comparable to 4G, which is complete bunk -- latency's a very important vital statistic when looking at ISPs, which they appear to completely gloss over (even if you generously assume they can compare their advertised maximum speeds with speeds actually achievable with 4G).

Bandwidth not coming close to "maximums" is an issue with overselling service, which WildBlue may or may not have an advantage in (they have far, far fewer customers, but probably also much less infrastructure [unless they share with Hughesnet - I don't know how "roaming" works with satellite ISPs] -- hard to say if it balances out, but if you have less satellites to choose from, that'll cause additional reliability problems). With satellite ISPs, the illusion of "peak speeds" is totally shattered, because they mean it when they say maximum -- you "MIGHT" get the advertised speed at some point throughout service (in my case, I ordered a mid-tier package and never saw speeds advertised for the cheapest package).


As far as pricing, Wildblue's 10gb/mo plan is $60/mo + a 2-year contract. A 15GB/mo limit is $90/mo + contract. A 25GB limit is $140/mo + contract. Those are in addition to hidden/grey fees and a $50 setup fee. Keep in mind, the BTC blockchain alone is coming up on 12GB (+ overhead and seeding traffic). Because of the harsh contract, there's no way to test-drive the service (Hughesnet at least offers 30 days to cancel without penalty). OTOH, Wildblue is at least truthful enough not to promise higher theoretical speeds based on which package you order.

Satellite infrastructure, even after the "revolutionary" upgrades in 2012, is still inadequate for digital age unless you believe the "digital age" is reading emails and news stories (Skype can probably be stuffed in so long as you keep it text). Their only saving grace is that they act as a gap between dial-up infrastructure while already-obsolete ADSL infrastructure is slowly rolled out in the rural US, which probably wouldn't ever happen if the USG weren't shoveling hundreds of millions at DSL providers in grants.

Might be worth finding a good company that doesn't do that kind of thing then, the disadvantage may be a sacrifice in speed but if it's constant then it will work better than the connection you've got, I'll bet they're out there.

Yeah, I had satellite for ~a month, a year ago. It was pretty terrible. Harsh caps (10GB/mo for "cheap" package), ultra-high latency, unreliable (outages when dense clouds rolled by), and massive slowdowns at peak times (their idea of "peak times" are during daylight). Speeds proved roughly equal to the weak 3G signal I'm tethered to, now, and 3G is "uncapped" (until they forcibly terminate my contract  ). The high latency makes it unsuitable for VOIP, so I'd still be stuck with a landline or cell bill, which pushes the "real" cost to $100+/mo compared to $60/mo for cell phone.



ETA: The 10GB is really 5GB during peak time (while everyone's awake), and 5GB you can only use between 2-6am or something silly like that.

Have you thought about satellite? I've heard that isn't so bad anymore, I was actually researching it and I saw 2MB speeds as standard so that's not too bad.

Edit: Scratch that, looks like it's changed even higher since I looked, I'm just looking at the UK companies now though, I think I was looking at global stuff before.

https://www.satelliteinternet.co.uk/packages

No upgrades available unless I move (or have a slow T1 line run out to my house for something like $8k + $180/mo). I have a bunch of pamphlets drawn up to hand out to the villagefolk with a direct contact for someone in the (non-)serving DSL company who draws up expansion plans out here, but not the balls to actually distribute them and interact with humans. It seems very undignified to have to campaign/beg for something pretty much every other being in post-industrial nations have. I guess I'll have to just have a few drinks and get over it soon.

I'll try out the cheat fix for pointlessly-locked content. RTW is still downloading (no clue what I did with the CD).

Well I'm afraid Rome: Total War has been modded like crazy compared to the others but luckily I can recommend something simple, you can google this if I got it wrong but if you go into the desc_strat text file of Rome: Total War you can see all the factions listed there in sections 'playable' and 'non-playable' if you copy/paste the non-playable stuff over over to playable and you'll be able to play the minor factions like Thrace/Dacia/Macedon.

A lot of the Rome: Total War mods are huge unfortunately so if your bandwidth is that low maybe it's time to consider an upgrade

^You have any suggested RTW mods? (keeping in mind I only get ~20-80kb/s download bandwidth)

There are a ton of good-looking ones, but I don't look forward to spending literally a week or two downloading all the mods which *look* interesting. Mostly interested in graphical improvements (as a major pack), music add-ons, AI improvements, and higher unit diversity. DarthMod usually has me covered on all of that, though Idunno how thorough the RTW mod is. Not particularly interested in new factions or fantasy overhauls.

I'd rather trust the user reviews than the 'professional' reviews, so far the only accurate review I've seen of Rome 2 Total War was from the angry gamer guy I posted and I think there was one other on metacritic that gave it a low score and there was a guardian review that completely agreed with everyone else too.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/06/total-war-rome-ii-review

I have the promotional calendar somewhere, still.  I don't remember things from yesterday very well - much less 10+ years ago. I'll try it out again.
>uninstalls RTW2

(oddly enough, RTW2's ratings on metacritic are continuing to fall after patches. Was [critic/user] 8.1/4.2, now 7.9/3.8. I'm not sure if that indicates much more than many game reviewers being lazy and posting a pseudo-review after a couple hours of play based more on game hype.)

You haven't played Rome: Total War have you? They not only have war dogs but later in the game you get exploding pigs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cv_ISQt1no

Edit: Incendiary pigs, sorry, I posted this while I was tired.

If there isn't a mod to add war dogs, it's an obsolete game as far as I can tell.

I re-installed Rome 1 Total War and I've really enjoyed it compared to Rome 2 so fuck you again creative assembly it seems days the only thing a game developer needs to do to keep me happy is code a game that actually works >_<.

i heard/read the KI is awful (agian) ?  


epic  :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdpIENG0Y2k

Angry Gamer does some good reviews

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_QK-lcW8a8

BAHAHHAHAAHAHAHHHH!!

Honestly, I don't know why I'm so worried about programming sometimes, I can't possibly do as badly as some of these guys have

Fun fact: if you check the Wikipedia page on CoH2, they try to attribute the 1.6/10 user score to a campaign against unfair representation of the Soviet government. 

Excellent!... I mean uh... Bad users! Bad!

RTW2 rocking a 4.2/10 user score on Metacritic, 3rd lowest rating of recent PC releases. Sega's other recent published release, CoH2, is enjoying (one of?) the lowest ratings I've seen in a long time, at 1.6/10, the lowest of recent PC releases. These may be top contenders for the biggest all-time user/critic score discrepancies, too. RTW2 criticavg-useravg=3.9, CoH2 criticavg-useravg=6.4 which could well be a record. Good thing they got out of the hardware business to focus on games.

(Some of the other worst let-downs in the past couple years include D3, which has cavg-uavg of 5.0, and SimCity Societies, with cavg-uavg of 2.2, though critics gave Societies a fairly low score of 6.3. Gone Home is also setting some records - very indie, but absolutely tanking with players, cavg-uavg of 5.0.)

For reference, 2009 biggest discrepancies (note the gap closed a bit on almost all of these): http://www.metacritic.com/feature/game-critic-scores-vs-user-reviews (highest difference then was 4.9)

lol

I already have a good GPU which I do use for casual mining like I said, it's just the processor, it's an old intel duo core I doubt they even still keep them in production now and it's always had problems handling lots and lots of stuff on the screen at once.

maybe you can play with a miner   ?

i just bought Rome "1", because only the graphic is cheaper, the rest is the same as Rome 2 i guess.

Ahahahahhhhh!..... Beta That's a good one There are still problems with Shogun 2 Total War and they went and released the gold version which is basically declaring it finished.

The game was relased yesterday,just wait for the beta to be over

I just thought I'd post to tell people my experience with Rome 2 Total War so far ( yes I've downloaded it already ) here are some pro's and con bullet points which I'm sure creative assembly will completely ignore next release and not fix for this game either like they always do.

The good:

. As far as I can tell so far victory conditions are now based on victory conditions, so they game only ends when you've been defeated or have accomplished your objectives, no more time limits like in previous games WOO!

. No distance to capital, it actually seems to be possible to make your settlements 100% happy so they don't rig the stats against you this means you won't be punished for having a large and well managed empire but you'll still be fucked if you don't keep an eye on settlements that are going downhill

. A.I is actually as transparent as they say though they still seem to be a bit cranky they're a lot more open to diplomacy than they used to be so the game doesn't force you to fight the whole world you actually get a list of statistics that probably explain why they hate you as opposed to wondering why the fuck they attacked you despite you having trade agreements with them etc. like in previous games

. The game does look good, though I place little stock in graphics with games but I do like to have some, even on low settings because of my poor processor it still look like an alright game

. Most things can be disabled that annoy you, for some reason Creative Assembly decided to add those horrid cartoon streaks to indicate projectile fire ( Seriously Creative wtf? ) but they can thankfully been turned off, same goes for hints etc. and you can have the classic total war camera back rather than the horrid new one they put in which I don't like

. When my processor doesn't fry the battles look fairly impressive but so far I've only been able to really use hit and run tactics mostly because I always seem to wind up against way more troops than I have or I just auto-assault because they just try to send swarms of skirmishers at me


The bad:

. Agent spam is still around folks, it seems some of the previous annoyances I had about Total War games are still there, it's almost like there's an intelligent person in the dev team who keeps constantly arguing with everyone else about the annoying features but they won't get rid of them because they're either too lazy or it's too difficult for them the good news is though that the A.I doesn't seem to resort to it so desperately as they used to which may be a half-assed attempt at fixing it on their part

. They aren't even trying to hide the fact that they're milking the fuck out of DLC content, the Greek states who I will tell people new to the Total War games are featured as pre-order only DLC content, you can play as Macedon in this game but Athens, Sparta and Epirus are off limits, I suspect they've got all these minor factions out there and so carefully balanced for the sake of DLC content which they're going to severely rip people off with they also don't seem to have very much blood going on so expect another shitty 99c/99p DLC you have to buy for enabling it.

. I'm still getting used to the interface which is a lot more like Empire Total War was than Shogun 2 or other previous games but I've found it very annoying to locate my characters to upgrade their skills, there's probably a shortcut somewhere or something I don't know about but I can't understand why they don't just give a 'zoom to location' option on the faction messages like they normally do with everything else

. I've only been able to really fight on plains but so far winning seems to be more about having the units with the best stats yet again than really being about your strategy and how you can use the terrain to your advantage

. The game is DRM infested like most big company releases, I can't in good faith ever recommend a game that forces people to connect to the internet to play it, if you have any dignity as a gamer don't get suckered into the anti-piracy propaganda, thankfully it seems the pirate groups are getting round even creative assemblies always on DRM properly now so it's not too much of a problem just yet, installing Rome 2 Total War was really easy this time

The catastrophic:

This game is clearly not designed for low spec computers, I'm going to be saving up for a new processor as some of you already know but the main problem with total war games as has always been the case is that they insist on constantly using these extremely high resource campaign maps, they are massive, they have lots and lots of A.I calculations that the computer has to do so it takes forever a lot of times to end a turn. They spit particles across the screen whenever a character accomplishes something or there are pre-rendered animations which pop up that can easily bugger up your computer. So I'll say it again just in case it wasn't clear, don't play this game if you're low spec, you need a damn good processor to play this game, on their demonstrations, I think I heard them say they had an i7 or something.

I've complained about this before on the official forums and was ignored but the easiest way to fix this would be to simply use sprites for the campaign which would be easy to implement and would solve problems for people who don't have powerful processors but of course all they've done is just lowered the polygon count for the main models and lowered the texture resolution without doing fuck all about the particle effects and the amount of shit the computer has to calculate to keep the game working.

Anyway if you have a good computer it's probably great most of the time but on a low spec computer, fucking frustrating to play, for the record, I don't believe this is a huge problem with my processor even though I will be upgrading because it's clearly being a bother. I run most games fine even stuff like Battlefield 3 ran comfortably on low settings and I can play Supreme Commander, played metro last light recently too and that's not running too badly though you have a problem with freezing on it at first with the main menu and I'm convinced that my processor doesn't seem to lots lighting, volumetric and particle effects happening all at once.


TLDR: Don't support games companies with shitty business practices, who support the anti-piracy lobby and don't optimise their games properly

I'll criticize whoever and whatever I like I wouldn't mind these games so much if they worked once in awhile but the problem is I managed to find a bug that forced me to restart from the checkpoint because one of those shielded Zin aliens somehow managed to get stuck inside a wall and I couldn't kill him because the bullets couldn't hit his foot sticking out, probably should fraps all the crap I spot with these developers and put it on youtube. I don't understand why people like to take it so personally when people point out blatant flaws in their games, if anyone points out bugs and glitches in my programming I'd be all like "Holy shit that looks annoying, looks like I've got some glitches to get rid of" I just wish people would correct the fucking problems and make the game great rather than just live in denial and annoy the rest of us who have a brain >_<.

What I fucking love as well with Mortal Kombat I just played recently is they completely abandoned the idea of a mouse, I mean completely, I know it's a console port but holy shit! I kind of liked the game itself but with the way they had set it up it just didn't work that well with the keyboard either so with the layout the developers had picked and the way they controls were actually programmed I haven't really been able to find a comfortable way of doing combination moves on the keyboard.

First of all, after playing it - fuck you for criticizing SR4.

Secondly - fuck Volition and their stupid cunting song choice. Don't get me wrong - I'm pretty sure that was the best intro sequence I've ever watched. But now... in my head.... that horrible Aerosmith song (I thought it was Meatloaf before noticing in the end-credits). Don't wanna close my eyes, don't wanna fall asleep, cause I'd miss you baby, and I don't want to miss a thi-ing. Ugh.

That's part of the collection. I'll have a look later today if it does the same for me.

I'm talking about Shogun 2 LOL Rome 2 isn't even out yet.

I actually just bought the Master Collection last week and am playing through Rome (1) the first time and played around a bit with Medieval 2 and I can speed up spies and diplomats by pressing [space] for my own forces and remove having to see the AI moves by turning off "Follow AI forces" in both titles. Maybe something is bugged in Rome 2?

Yeah, the worst one is the monk animation because that lasts the longest, like I said, I played back when Shogun 1 first came out, I know all the crap that Creative Assembly pull haven't you lot tried skipping it before?

Wow, that's retarded. Have you tried disabling "Follow AI forces" in the gameplay options?

lol well it's interesting, like I said the agent spam can't be skipped, you can skip the other stuff fine, but for some reason they decided it was a good idea to have agents spam their assassination animations or bribery animations constantly so when you inevitably have to deal with all the clans it becomes unbearable, again, stupid stupid programming choices.

Press [space]


And Papers, Please is pure awesome.

lol I've never heard of it, but look what just popped up on Zero Punctuation

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/7959-Papers-Please-and-Brothers-A-Tale-of-Two-Sons

That's some weird staple in GTA clones. Checkpoint systems died pretty much everywhere else (except linear FPS games and platformers, where it at least makes a little sense). Any normal person would have the thought to add a quicksave button. If I didn't always mix up the quick-save and quick-load buttons in Bethesda games, I'd use that as an example. 

You try out Papers, Please? It's a small, cheap, and fun spot-the-difference adventure game - which makes it sound like it belongs on Facebook, but I was pretty fond of it -- wasn't even on my radar until I got the creepy "x is now playing y" spam from Steam (one more reason to pirate).

hahah, I played the original Shogun back when it first came out on a CD-ROM I know all the tricks to get the game mostly working I just find it sad that I have to do all these workarounds in order to enjoy a game that would be perfectly good if it was programmed properly. I wish they'd just fucking fix it but I doubt they will until the original staff quit or get fired somehow because they seem to be in arrogant denial like most established games industry companies.

So far the only inspiration the games industry has provided lately for my own programming projects is how absolutely not to do games, I just recently rage quit on Saints Row IV because the fuckers hadn't programmed that properly either, I was almost to the end of a large battle and then the game crashed on me, forcing me to load up from the beginning because they wouldn't allow you to save wherever you wanted during a mission.

Absolutely fucking shitty cunting coding, really horrible.

To solve all problems:
1) Buy the game, then pirate it (or opposite way, depending on how much you trust CA). 2/7 solved, plus no obnoxious always-on requirement.
2) Wait a month (or 6) before playing, then download one of the massive compilation mods. 2-4 of 7 solved (depending on how sincere CA's promise to increase moddability was). In particular, find a mod which automatically auto-resolves naval battles so you aren't lured into watching ships move in a straight line for 10 minutes.
3) Ignore MP. 1/7 solved.

To solve other inevitable issues:
1) Never, ever use any that fancy destructible environment. That's just asking to get your units glitched for the rest of the battle.
2) Never play sieges. That's just asking for the bad pathfinding AI to lag the game to a crawl while still tactically failing in every single battle. (It was a lot better in STW2, though)


So there you go -- no naval battles, maybe half the number of land battles (with the main features removed), and no multiplayer. It sounds terrible, but it's the best way to play TW games, I've found.

Sorry guys, posted in the wrong bloody board moved it now.

Allow me to explain the title but I'm in a love-hate thing with creative assembly at the moment and I'm looking forward to Rome 2 Total War but they keep fucking things up all the time, some of the stuff looks fantastic like being able to bring in reinforcements from your naval fleet on the coast and recruiting units away from your cities without having to wait for them to get there ( that was a real pain in the arse if any of you played the previous total war games ) but I just get the feeling they're going to fuck things up again. They have this weird habit of fixing certain features and doing them really brilliantly like land battles or they completely fuck it over like with agents and naval warfare, here's what I think will happen when we finally get the game.

. A.I Agents will still spam unskippable animations against you except even worse now because of how big the map is

. They'll have DRM'd the shit out of the game and will try to force you to connect to the internet in order to play it like Shogun 2 even if you just want to play the campaign

. Lots and lots of cheap and nasty DLCs, expect to have to pay for blood again ( Yes, they actually had the fucking balls to try and charge people 0.99 for fucking blood in a war game, that is a low move for a games company that doesn't even need the money )

. Already we've seen factions that would normally have been in the main campaign ( Greeks etc. )

. A.I will keep spamming diplomacy at you if you don't go to war with them or agree to their demands to shut them up, hopefully we won't have to deal with unskippable diplomat agent animations like in the earlier games, they thankfully got rid of that in Shogun 2

. There will be no sandbox mode despite constant and noticeable protest for one I've seen with no victory conditions and just lots of total war gameplay

. The terrain modifiers etc. will be nerfed again, I've seen some improvements ( they have introduced some impressive line of sight stuff but still seem to keep the general in plain view all the time from what I can see ) but chances are if you put your archers on a hill they'll do even less damage than Shogun 2 and they'll just compensate for this by putting silly overpowered units in to make it seem like they've done something which will ruin the whole point of strategies in the game

. Multiplayer will be a piece of shit like in most cases of total war games, either it will be too laggy because of the amount of units, imbalanced because of the way the game is set up, or imbalanced because they've decided to introduce shitty RPG elements into a game that should be about strategy and not how many experience points you have like in Shogun 2 to piss away on expensive units

I was quite happy with the idea that I'll be able to play Macedon though so I'll probably be picking them on my first campaign and being able to expand your already owned cities will solve a lot of limitations the original Rome had on the campaign.