f13.net

Go play the best mounted combat ever devised

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-afRyuVuFg#t=1m25s

Jesus, that was painful.  Why not just smash my nuts with a ball peen hammer?  At least that's free.

that video is more persuasive than a yahtzee review. persuading, that is, to not touch it with a 10 foot pole.

That really sucks too, because the game as I remember is damn fun.

What's 75% off make it cost wise?

Cheap. It was £6.something over here; which, bearing in mind we get ripped off plus the pound is collapsing, is probably under $10.
Also if you don't buy this you hate independent game development.  :grin:

It is a much better game than the video would lead you to think.  In particular, the game does not attempt to rupture eardrums.

The video makes it looks like combat on ice. And is not a selling point.

So is it worth it for ~$10?

Can you go into any detail about its virtues? Sometimes I'm willing to overlook dated combat animation if the rest of the game is good on other fronts.

It's basically a very, very good combat engine in a real time first person strategy-game*-slash-sandbox that thinks its a low fantasy (no elves, no magic) RPG.
Basically, you finish character creation and it drops you off in the middle of the world map and says "Okay, go have fun". Want to be a baron? Go find a king, do his dirty work and you'll get given a castle eventually. Which you'll have to defend. Want to be a bandit? Pick a nearby village and attack it. Want to be a merchant? Buy low, sell high. And so on. Also, the community for it is very good, including quite a few solidly done total conversions for it.

And you'll be supporting a game made by a software house that was up until fairly recently a husband and wife team and that's it. Cut them a little slack.  :grin:

*in the sense that your 'party' is likely to have anywhere up to 100 people, and you're more likely to be sieging castles and laying waste to enemy forces rather than following a linear path through a dungeon with your Team of Five.

Edit: IGN have actually got a pretty fair review up. (http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/939/939311p1.html)

What are some of the good total conversions?

Very much so, if you like mounted combat.  I don't know what they've done since I bought it 3 or so years ago when it was still in dev, but it was worth $11 to me then to unlock all the features.  I can't imagine more time has made it less buyable.

I'd love to buy this, but steam has no purchase link for it lol.

The Eagle & The Radiant Cross (moves the timeline forward a couple of hundred years, adds a new faction, adds pikes and gunpower).
Native Enhanced (A mod based around fixing all the things in the core game that annoyed the mod's author).
There's also a beta/demo for a Peloponnesian War mod, a siege warfare mod (Age of Machinery)...and the old Middle-Earth TC is still (supposedly) under development. The game's forums have a more in-depth list of TC as well.

They've sold out of keys at the sale price. Apparently at least one game shop chain has the retail boxed copy at a sale price though, so keep your eyes open.

I fail to see how you sell out of keys when it's all digital.

Take my money and let me download it?

Wuh?

Here's the link.  $7.50 (http://store.steampowered.com/app/22100/)

Also, I've spent like 18 hours playing this this weekend.  It never gets old (although I'm still irritated that holding a spear or lance in couched mode while mounted is total fucking easy mode.  Trying to hit guys with a mace as you ride by is much harder but much more fun).  It's possible the video is only exciting to people who've already played it, because it reminds you how awesome it is, in which case it was a bad choice to feature it.  But no screenshot or video is going to get it across, because it's not about the graphics. 

Edit by Trippy: fixed your link, and there was no add to cart button yesterday (I checked after MrHat posted)

Yeah, it was there for me too today, Run before it vanishes again!

I've bought this game twice already before it hit steam (I lost my key once). That's how good it is. If some big ass studio would just copy this idea and make an AAA game out of it, it would be something beyond awesome. Unless they fucked it up of course.

Still on sale.  I guess Steam takes long weekends.

Newbie tips - How to:

Get Cash
* Go do melees in the various town arenas until you get comfortable with the combat. Once you're winning the melees regularly, go find an actual arena tournament and bet on yourself in every round.
* Go after looters - they fall over if you sneeze on them and while the cash isn't great, you'll be getting skills and levels. Run away from anything harder until you get a mercenary band.

Build an army
* First things first - at lower levels, all you really need is more warm bodies than the enemy. Run around and recruit peasants from villages until you've got ~20. Train up any that survive combat, recruit more meatshields militia to make your numbers up. Rinse and repeat.

Win battles
* Pressing the backspace key in combat gives you an overhead map with everyone shown on it, and also allows you to order people to places rather than 'Follow me!'
* 'f1', 'f2', & 'f3' will be your friends ('Hold position', 'Follow me' and 'Charge!' respectively. Keep your minions nearby at lower levels, rather than letting them mill about aimlessly. It's simple concentration of force - better to have ten of your guys beating down that steppe raider with clubs rather than having them spread out and trying to chase cavalry on foot.
* Terrain does matter. Try to move your troops onto a hilltop if possible. Moving uphill slows you down or, more importantly, slows down the ragtag group of bandits...letting your archers get another volley or two in.

Random stuff
* Archery on horseback. Don't do it until you get your horseback archery skills up to decent levels. You will miss.
* Get a horse ASAP.
* When you've got a horse, get a lance and learn how to charge people.
* Captured prisoners can be recruited into your army from the camp menu (but will probably desert fairly quickly) or sold to ransomers or slavers for cash.
* Two-handed weapons have better reach and do more damage, but need more effort and practice to parry attacks with. 1-handers & shield are easier, but do less damage and you will lose the shield sooner or later.
* Recruit at least one named NPC and train him/her up as a medic (first aid/surgery).

I find that my survival is improved greatly when I get where I can mace someone in the head as my horse charges by.  But polearms are cool, too. :awesome_for_real:

side-macing is difficult to master, but a strong strategy.  The upside is that lance-couching, while ridiculously easy and fatal when you're galloping, is completely useless when your horse runs into a tree and/or an enemy (or when you're going uphill) and you need to have the ability to swipe at the rabble around you.

That is exactly it, I can mace someone even with my horse not moving.  Doing it at a gallop is just icing on the neck stump.  Hell, even swinging a fucking claymore from horseback is better than lancing, in my opinion, although it's a lot harder to do.  Plus I can dismount and cut a bitch if I need to for some reason.

I like to dismount to kill that last guy just on principle.  It just seems more badass.  Like, I just wiped out your whole fucking army and I don't even need a horse to stick a spear in your face, clownshoe.

Except my current character is an archer so I really don't do any of that shit these days.  I just snipe people from the next hill over while I let my conscripts level up.

Not a very good tutorial, and why in arenas/tournaments do I seem to get a random weapon?

Overall, seems like a $7.50 game. Not impressed

I'm a member of the "mace to the face" school myself. After all, you need money to pimp the villages you get from your king. So every dead enemy is 50 gold less in my pocket.

I don't do Arenas anymore. It sucks when you get a fucking bow and the enemy has lancers on horses.

I used to always attack on horseback with the biggest, baddest, longest-handled axe I could find. Only one hit per pass, but it was always a big one. Enough to one-shot many opponents.

Accidently played 3 hours last night.  God damn.

My steppe horse archer is getting pretty pro.  Although, I had a call to arms, recruited 30 peasents, joined a 50 on 50 fight.  We lost.

They were all on horses.  I managed to kill 11 of the dudes near the end.  But then I ran into another horse, which slowed me down.  Then they swarmed me!

Horse riding ++.

I also pillaged one of their villages.  Alone.  Vs. 50 farmers.  Hahaha, I trampled them.

Because in arenas/tournaments you get a random weapon.

If you get wtfgimped (archer on foot surrounded by guys with axes on horseback) run towards the first guy that gets knocked out and take his/her weapon.  And get on the first horse that gets de-ridered.

I was so thrilled when I discovered this myself.  Was a very "Gladiator" moment.  Ran over to the guy and looked around in a panic and noticed I could take his sword.  Grabbed the sword, ran over to a horse, mounted the horse, then pwnd the dudes that were left.

I can't stop playing this game.

Do heroes take up a certain number of party slots?  I'm at 77/120 and it says I'm at maximum party size :(

Hm.  No, 1 each as far as I know.  Maybe you have 77 healthy?  Wounded peeps don't count in the total on some displays, though they don't stay wounded long.

That could maybe be it.  Was just annoying to get the "You're maximum" when clearly I wasn't it.  I'll double check next time I sit down with it.

Thanks!

God damn this game has gripped me.  It's even got loots.  The mods really sell it.  I bet you could mod in some crazy diablo2 randomness too.

Man a diablo type loot mod would make this the perfect game.

I've played a couple of times for less than an hour each, turning it off each time when I get screwed over having forgotten to save.
I'm also not excited by the idea of recruiting a bunch of stupid AI meatshields as a necessity in the game, either. I'm glad I got it on sale (the last sale they had, new year's I think) but I'm also glad I didn't pay anything near full price, since I doubt I'll play much of it again.

Having said that, this post of Simonds is more useful than all the docs the game doesn't have.

Apparently there is a multiplayer expansion pack that's in development

http://www.gamershell.com/companies/paradox_interactive/548902.html
http://www.vgblogger.com/?p=4346

I played this for about 10 hours yesterday   :ye_gods:

Knights with lances + sandbox = happy Montague. The clownshoe graphics don't even faze me.

Theres really nothing wrong with the graphics, they are perfectly decent.

Do I even want to admit that I didn't change the video settings after installing?  :oh_i_see:

The graphics are hit or miss.  The characters and their animations are really good, but the map screen looks like concentrated ass.  And you spend a lot of time there, so it gives a bad impression.

But as you say, who cares.  It's all about throwing your javelin in some raider's face.

I picked this up recently after playing the demo like 5 times to level 7. At that point I just had to buy it, and I really like it alot. I love the leadership aspect and sandbox feel of the game.

I have been playing this since before I reviewed it for F13 about a hundred years ago. I play for a couple weeks, get distracted by something shiny, and then go back and play this again when the urge strikes. The strides they have made since I first played it are amazing. If they could get a coop MP game (PvP strat game would take a month of Sundays, but I guess you could treat it like a marathon game of Civ or something with saved games) it would be way cool. Pity that is pretty much out of the scope of the tiny dev team.

Have said this about 1000 times before, but again- if some MMOG dev house could license their combat engine it would print money hats galore.

Holycrapnecro! While I suppose that most of F13 has finished with this game, I thought I'd pop in to mention that the Graphics Enhancement 2.5 (http://forums.taleworlds.net/index.php?PHPSESSID=e650eb9318a88e73909febe53c20d480&topic=36914.0) mods does wonders at fixing small things. It's not perfect, but it satisfies a lot of the things which bothered me subconsciously. The Battle Size Changer mod (http://forums.taleworlds.net/index.php/topic,8058.0.html) is also absolutely required, though expect a performance hit on...less robust machines.

I'm not sure though if you're able to mod the Steam version of the game, and is my chief concern against purchasing it that way. It would be nice to not have to keep track of my activation key for the rest of my life though.

Yes, you can.  Finding the directory that the game is installed in is a minor pain in the ass, but once you do dropping mods in there is like any other install.