What does?
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What does?
Being a republic. Your potential for expansion is extremely limited.
Why? As a Republic you have all the casus belli that the feudal lords don't you? So long as you have Holy War as a Norse I expect to be able to expand against most of the map, plus it has the bonus of being able to easily reset vassals to being cities.
Going to try and change the map from castles to cities.
Because everything belongs to the republic, not your family. Once your family is no longer in power, you lose pretty much everything. Also, you can only hold cities without a penalty (not castles). That makes it incredibly difficult to raise armies. You have to rely mostly on mercenaries and your private troops, and that only gets you so far. Plus when your family isn't in power, your income gets destroyed, which makes it hard to retain any family possessions.
I thought you only lose your capital, not the rest of your holdings? And especially with palace upgrades and high income it's easy to have a lot of retinues raised. Been a while since I've played, though.
I don't recall the specifics, but I remember that I was making a ridiculous amount of money when I was in power, and significantly less when I wasn't. Retinues can only get you so far.
Capital title and all titles of the same tier belong to the Republic, so if are a Duchy tier Republic then if you lose you'll keep your personal demesne outside of the capital. If you're a king tier Republic then you'd get to keep you secondary duchy I believe and its vassals as well as your demesne. Key though is to try to ensure you win the election and stay in power. Once you're rich enough you can buy the election. Though losing now and then keeps the game fresh and gives an opportunity to seize rival families trade posts, which you can't while Doge.
I thought you can personally can hold cities and castles not just cities, though there's a penalty to opinion on vassal castles. Though I prefer vassal cities to castles anyway, money pays for mercenaries and retinues which are better than levies. Mercs and Retinues can be used as standing armies and reinforce while in enemy land which levies can't.
Oh, right. The max size of your demesne plummets as well if you have a higher title.
True but still it's an opportunity and challenge to rejig and rebalance your internal power before reclaiming your rightful place as ruler of the Republic. Makes a change from becoming King and staying as undisturbed god-ruler forever. If you suffer a setback of losing an election you can make some progress, get to the position of winning the next election then call an early election by murdering the current leader. Politics. :D
My point is that you then have to give up a bunch of your cities or take a huge hit to your earnings and levies. And if you do give them up, there's no fast way of getting them back.
Save money, kill the current ruler, buy a win. Job done.
The AI seems to spend its money on upgrades rather than buying the election, so long as you prioritise buying the election there's almost never a reason to lose it. Only time I've ever lost it is because I've either decided I wasn't willing to buy it for the price it currently cost, or there were two elections in quick succession, or I've been fighting a war that was harder than I expected so I've withdrawn my election fund to hire more Mercs.
Rulers die suddenly. Sometimes it happens after the computer got a sudden jump in prestige. I also don't like that you can't really intermarry with other families (your children always leave your court) and that you're stuck with your oldest family member.
Can't you designate heir? That was one of the benefits of a Republic that I saw - that you can pass your kingdom to the kid you hadn't fucked up.
Not from what I can recall. I believe it was the oldest family member who's at your court, even if that meant your brother.
I recall you could name a successor. Maybe I'll play tonight to check :)
You can give anyone in your dynasty the honorary title of Designated Heir thus making them your heir over-ruling normal precedence. Of course if they're younger then you'll need to pay more to buy the election.
If anything Republics are overpowered, but I find them fun.
Must have missed that. :o Anyway, the best Republic to form is around Denmark. There are a few territories in that vicinity that allow you to build multiple extra cities.
But how do you get good heirs when your choice of marriage partners is extremely limited?
You can get good marriage partners - you just have to buy your wife.
Not practical early on, but sure, I suppose that could work later.
What do you count as a good marriage partner? I typically go for good traits (for my characters bonus) and genetics (for the kids) over rank so the dowry if any is usually quite small.
I'd rather marry a genius with great stewardship who can boost my demesne limit and pass genius on to the kids than marry the dumb princess of the HRE. Though as Norse there's slim pickings at the start for any kind of wife anyway.
Genius trait. Not too many of those around.
Well there's currently no unmarried Pagan geniuses in my game so makes no difference if feudal or republic. Later on hope it becomes easier.
Just created a republic in Sjaelland. Don't see that title available...
Edit: figured out problem. They weren't at my court.
I go for inheritable traits first (genius or quick), good stats that I need second, and I mainly marry off siblings or younger children for the alliances, while trying to get a large dynasty, but with as few as possible people holding claims. Dynasty members make good vassals, usually.
I ended up subscribing but I'm on Zalera because there was the RL invite came from so I won't be moving.
I hit level 50 and am working on the extreme trials now (screw you Extreme Titan, 8 DF parties and counting now).
PROS:
Never ending things to do. The amount of content this game has is crazy. Crafting, Gathering (neither of which I do). VERY LONG main quest line, Trials, Dungeons, HM Dungeons, Raids, Hunts, Beast Tribe Quests, ATMA farming (thought his might be a con) Chocobo developing, collecting aaaand a crazy crap load of side quests.
Skill based content. The pre-50 dungeons won't challenge you too much but HM and Extreme mode can be quite rough. I like challenge - keeps the game from getting stale.
Active updates - major patch released every few months means if you finally do get a lot of things capped you have new stuff to do soon.
CONS:
While I appreciate skill based content some of the moves Titan EX makes are not a skill check but a latency check. If I play late at night after the wife goes to sleep and isn't on Netflix I dodge plumes all day long. During the evening... I die terribly.
Some content is grindy - ATMA farming is probably the worst as the RNG is very low for each FATE you do and doing FATEs in low level zones is the definition of boring.
Crafting outside of vanity gear seems unimpressive. Due to the speed of leveling making gear for your character at level isn't that useful. Pre-50 zones aren't that rough so its not like you need that edge.
Verdit - If you like skill based MMOs or love the world of Final Fantasy I HIGHLY recommend the game. If reacting quickly due to latency or just general reflexes you probably won't get to do some of the harder things so you may want to pass if that's the case.
Paradox sale this weekend. Upto 85% off their entire catalogue.
Just got Rajas of India for £2.49 :)
I tried Kerbal Space Program with the realism overhaul mods, so it's, well, more real, with a real earth, proper sizes, heating on reentry, etc., and now I haven't managed to get any astronauts back alive yet :(
So, seems to me that Blizzard once again made a hash of things. One would've thought they might've learned from past experiences.
Take the launch of the Diablo3 addon. Quite a fiasco. I also remember previous addons being a bit bumpy as well.
One of those bumps lead them to create 2 different starter zones in WotLK to spread things out more. So what did they do this time? Force everyone to return to the same spot if you want to use a heavily advertised feature (garrisons).
No wonder that the instance server croaked. They also reduced the number of possible concurrent logins. Though I don't quite see why: You can log in after waiting, yes.
But you're seeing absolutely nothing but other players (and those only if you stop and wait for some seconds), NPCs don't appear and your abilities have a huge lag (minutes) if they work at all. Seems to me as if the number of concurrent players is still way too high.
Geeze. One would've thought that they'd have been able to create some kind of test for this kind of scenario. I mean, with providers like Azure or EC2 there should be some possibility for a stress test without involving paying customers?
So....
I got Dragon Age 3 on the Xbox 360. Worst. Decision. Ever. I've seen clips of the fantastic graphics of this game and the 360 version is AWFUL. It also suffers from choppy 'graphics lag' during fights. So disappointing.
I guess I'm getting this on PC once they fix all the inevitable bugs.
Why would you buy a next gen game on a last gen platform? Thats like buying FIFA14 for the PS2.
In the case of FIFA (and other sports games), it's because EA removed most features in the new generation games. :o
Both me and the wife play. She doesn't do pretty much any PC games so it would easier. Also while she is playing DA3 I can be on the computer. If she was playing DA3 on the computer... I'd be sad since I couldn't play DA3 OR FFXIV.
Sadly my plans are going to end me chucking another $50 dollars or so for a PC copy. Maybe. We'll see. Kinda annoyed that DA2 looked better on the 360 than DA3.
Yes the PC is obviously the master race, and if you're to lazy to build a SteamBox for the living room you still have the next gen consoles.
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Shadow of Mordor (PC) is $19.99 on amazon right now, cheaper then the best black friday deal I've found for any console so far.
http://www.amazon.com/Middle-Earth-S...eywords=mordor
And.... I have a 32 bit operating system. Raaaaage. I've been advised there is a workaround but damn this is getting frustrating. (PC version requires a 64 bit operating system).
Get a new PC or new console. Or play old games. Lol.
Caved for an Xbox One finally. Bought it from Microsoft for $329, with kinect and 4 games. Best part is that I paid for it by selling 2 skylanders I picked up at Target during the black friday rush. :haha:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/331398973711...84.m1559.l2649
Picked up Shadowrun: Dragonfall. Good stuff. Turned based strategy similar to FFT and X-com only a lot grittier.
Got it working on my PC... damn DA3 is a good game. If you liked Origins or DA2 this is pretty much a must buy.
Only semi game related but we're currently on holiday and I found Baldur's Gate. Amanda thinks I'm a geek lol.