Pretty sure, historically, they were also pretty powerful. I remember at one point reading about several nations that had serious issues with horse archers. A ranged unit of constant mobility, of course they’d be difficult to deal with.
How effective they are does depend on what kind of game you’re playing, however.
In Age of Empires II horse archers are only really good in those civilisations that have adequate research for them. And then it requires a good deal of player skill to micro the units to make use of their enhanced mobility.
In Mount and Blade Bannerlord it all depends on terrain. Horse archers are deadly on any sort of open terrain, but introduce trees or even a mild amount of rockiness and those horse archers are in a serious disadvantage.
They were also rare. To effectively pull off horse archery, you needed good horses, good riders that also happened to be good archers (both of which weren’t trivial on their own, let alone combined) and good coordination. Bows are more effective the closer you are, so to get the most out of your arrows, you’ll want to close in, but then you also need to wheel off again without your riders getting in each other’s way, so you needed to drill maneuvers for that.
So you either need to have a sufficiently large body of soldiers with the leisure to train both archery and riding instead of working the fields, or you needed a society that treats them as basic skills anyway and only needed training in the military application. Nomadic peoples like the Scythians or Mongols often had the former, so they were notable sources of dangerous mounted archery, particularly where the raising and support of a professional army wasn’t feasible. Rome had the Equites Sagitarii, but they were part of the distinct social class we would call Knights, so not your rank-and-file soldier (and those were already more professional than later levy- or retinue-based militaries).
So if we were concerned about accuracy*, these units should be expensive and require good management to make the most of them, but be very dangerous too. The point about open / closed terrain certainly fits as well.
What’s a bit more foggy is how games usually handle bow effectiveness at range, but that’s its own topic.
*I do care about accuracy, but not at any cost - games need to be fun too, and that’s worth sacrificing some accuracy for.
Yeah, in Age of Empires II they’re more expensive than Skirmishers, who are archer-countering units. They’re also more expensive than regular archers, and that’s not going into the research that a good cavalry archer needs, as they’re also subject to some of the most expensive research options.
In Bannerlord you can get good horse archers only be recruiting young nobles. Then you have to spend time on levelling them up, because at the lower tiers they’re just not that good, and you risk a number of the dying before they reach a high enough level.
So between the two games I play that prominently feature horse archers, I’d say they’re managed pretty well, with the increased costs, slower training times, player skill, or levelling requirements.
Skirmishers as in “Light Cavalry”, designed to catch closing archery and ride them down? I’m not big on RTS (I suck at multitasking), but I’m always fascinated by gamified implementations of historical dynamics.
I don’t suppose they also support “recruit auxiliary specialists” as option?
So the skirmisher is a spear-throwing foot soldier with a shield. Historically a foot soldier would have a shield, a few throwing spears, and then a melee weapon. But in Age of Empires II the spear throwing and the melee are divided into two separate units.
Age of Empires II does have a light cavelry line, though, and they’re pretty quick. But only civs historically known for their good cavelry have bonuses towards them that make the viable (i.e. There are various steppe-civs in AoEII, as well as Mongols and Huns, and I’m sure Turks and Saracens have some benefit to light cav as well).
In this regard Age of Empires IV is more historically accurate, as that game can have completely unsymmetrical civs, whereas Age of Empires II has far more symmetrical gameplay.
Yes, this is late game where it’s easy to max out before the end. I will say I liked the progression in game. You certainly have to work a bit to get there, but then it’s satisfying.
Do people still play The Sims 4? I bought it like 7 years ago, played it once, got bored, and never picked it up again. I saw gameplay once of the Sims 3 and was genuinely surprised by how many more features it had.
The Build Mode features in 4 are pretty good if you’re into virtual dollhouse building, and there’s a ton of custom content for it (as long as you’re on PC).
Live Mode is not very good, but it’s functional enough to play dolls in the houses you built if you’re willing to do all the story writing to make up for sims not having very interesting personalities/desires/autonomy.
Yes, it’s widely streamed on Twitch, most of them are just chicks doing house builds. It’s pretty much a PC game version of HGTV to build homes with absurd amounts of customization. Most of them don’t even play the game, they just give themselves tons of money and build a “dream home” like some Ikea home builder simulator. Which is fair, btw, I just want to say that… Completely ok if they like that, not to bash them. But it’s not really playing the full extent of the game, building a family and a career and life simulating.
I genuinely hate it lol, as do all of my friends IRL.
We’re all huge into 14, which was produced by the same team. I mention it because there’s a ton of overlap with 14. The cinematography in the cutscenes and even the emotes the characters use feel lifted straight from the older game. The structure of the combat segments is also uncannily similar, they feel a lot like 14 dungeons. So, my group generally felt like the game got stale really quickly, which colored our impression as a whole.
The moment-to-moment gameplay also feels like a hyper simplified version of the “rotation” system in 14. You have a basic filler combo, and larger more powerful moves that can only be used again after a long cooldown timer. I found it to be under-stimulating, even after unlocking a few more things.
The story was awesome in the segments covered by the free trial, but then everything after that just kind of slipped off my brain. More than anything, I remember side quests in particular were really boring to the point where it felt like a joke.
We were really hyped and really really wanted to like the game when we first heard about it, and we were super hyped after playing the demo, but in the end it just felt like a really unpleasant slog to actually play.
At the same time however I can totally see why people do really enjoy the game. I think it’s a divisive release, and often the people who love/hate it will cite the exact same things but paint them in a different light. I ultimately wouldn’t not recommend the game, I think $50 is a really fair price for it too for what you’re getting
FF14 has sort of an unwritten rule, that you should ignore all side quests that are represented with the plain gold circle. They’re not even worth the time for XP and rarely have anything interesting happen in them. It’d be interesting if the same rule applies for FF16.
A 3070FE with no CPU bottleneck should not chug this game at 40fps on low settings with “ultra performance” DLSS at 3440x1440. Do better, devs.
Besides that, your complaints are 100% on point. As someone who had 2700 hours in FF14 before quitting, it’s clear they overclocked the engine to its limits and simply patched together whatever they could.
I called it as soon as they gave the FF16 project to Yoshi-P. He did the best he could with the tools he was given, and the only tool he knows is FF14.
We expect this man to produce a stellar mainline FF game while actively being the producer of the best MMO on the market while trying to finish multiple industry-leading expansions?
Square Enix is yet another example of corporate suicide by deliberate mismanagement. Let Yoko Taro loose, you cowards. Give him FF17 so we can go down in a blaze of glory.
It’s wild how CBU3 dumped FF14 design straight into FF16 and decided it was good enough. MMO gameplay makes a lot of design compromises to accommodate for the multiplayer shared-state world, network latency, etc. None of which make sense for a single player offline experience.
What do you do in FFXIV? Like I can’t look at a stand alone and expect the same. I even liked SOME of Strangers of Paradise just because of the job skill tree. It was what they embarked on back in ARR and it never happened.
But the demo for XVI and the crossover event was decent. I loved the Ifrit fight and the cave flight part. I am not sure about it though. If I could have done PC as the demo I would have bought it. But waiting 6 months is ass.
I was just asking what your main activity is in XIV. I’m a raider. So the story is cool, but not my driving factor in enjoying the game. The gameplay and mechanics are usually what makes me enjoy it.
Honestly I’ve done just about everything over the years except ultimates (I play with IRL friends and I’m happy if we can clear a savage tier lol)
If I had to pick a “main” activity I think it would be parsing tbh, I really enjoy chasing the numbers. I level up all jobs and also try to perfect at least the basic rotation for all of them. I’ll hang out on party finder and jump into extreme farms on off jobs to practice.
But there’s also been months where I’ve done nothing but like, ocean fishing, diadem, pvp (I love crystal conflict, best part about endwalker to me) and so on. That’s been one of my favorite things about the game; you can get totally wrapped up in a huge project. Almost like you can play the game to take a break from playing the game. Just recently we’ve gotten into treasure maps, super chill
Hmm. I wonder if we have partied together! I do the ultimates. I’m actually a Penta legend. But I don’t parse more than what I naturally do while clearing. I may chase an orange with BiS but I usually get bored after the first few weeks after BiS and go elsewhere.
I was just wondering if your main jam was housing or glam or just the story. If it’s raiding I probably wouldn’t dig 16 either.
Seems unlikely that all these would have fallen here.
I wonder what sort of creature would go around collecting them, only to leave them out where they would reflect light and attract the attention of anyone passing by. It’s almost as if…
that’s pretty much it. if you don’t like the first, you probably won’t like the second. if you DO like the first, you might prefer the second one. personally i bounced off of both of them around 10-15 hours in, for similar reasons, but I did find the 2nd game a little more exciting.
Yup. Last game I bought from them was Phoenix rising or something on the switch. Actually pretty fun. Until I learned I had to work around the forced login and online bullshit by throwing it in airplane mode at a specific time then suspending and resuming or some goofy ass shit. It’s a single player game. No I will not create and connect a useless account.
OpenMW counts as a remake of Morrowind, kinda. It only changes the game engine though.
But like, officially? Pretty unlikely. Which is fine, the old games are still good, easily available, and very playable. I’d rather that than Bethesda’s new games get delayed in favor of remaking old ones, and then the remakes completely change what the old games were into something they were not.
Not really, because it is in it’s core the same engine with the same limitations. It has the same worldspace and cell system as the original engine from Morrowind. Yes it has shader (a modern feature that is in the creation engine at least since Fallout 76, most likely even Fallout 4) and a LUA script engine besides the official creation script engine. This could be added to the engine very easily and that the Creation Engine doesn’t has this is a design decision not a engine limitation.
OpenMW is awesome, no arguments there. But it is really “just” an incredibly patched and modernized version of the Morrowind era gamebryo. One could argue it is comparable to if Bethesda ported Morrowind to Skyrim (they would be very much exaggerating but…).
But issues regarding level geometry, animations, world/cell space? All of that is still there.
After the massive blunder of Starfield, I cannot see how Elder scrolls 6 could possibly be successful
I mean, this statement alone supposes that the company will not learn anything from the failure. Even if you assume they do not care about the game or its players, they do care about their bottom line and profits and that alone is motivation to learn from mistakes.
I've personally not given them a dime since their bait-and-switch and other shady tactics around the launch of Fallout 76 (I was a paying ESO customer and I cancelled because of that). So far as I know, they didn't do anything like that for Starfield which would demonstrate some learning of lessons (unless I haven't heard of it).
The Talos Principle - It’s pretty much purely a puzzle game with a nice dose of philosophy to drive the story along. Some of the later puzzles can get pretty difficult, and some of the optional challenges will likely take you a good while to figure out without guides.
I’ll controversially say that I really love the Steam controller. Not the steam deck (which is honestly my number 1 if we’re including handhelds) but the original controller intended for use with the steam link device.
It really just needs a right analog stick and it would be great. The lack of one takes it from 10/10 to like a 7/10. It’s so good otherwise, great weight and size, good design. Sensible layout and the big track pads work really well! It was clearly a prototype for how the Deck layout ended up, though I actually like the controller’s big circular pads more than the decks little square ones.
The steam controller is absolutely my favorite shape and feel for the controller.
The one big flaw is the plastic bumper mechanism that has broken on 3 of my units, 1 I was able to send back, 1 replaced with PETG 3D printed part which is less clicky, but more durable, and 1 still intact.
Still, I have exclusively used those for years when not playing on Switch
The steam deck honestly is my favorite controller. If valve releases a controller that’s the steam deck without a screen I’ll be first in line and I’ll take two please.
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