Hmm...so if I could pick the absolute worst parts of Dark Souls 2, it would be Brightstone Cove Tseldora, The Shrine of Amana, and the Undead Crypt.
(Minor mention to The Gutter and the foggy section of the Shaded Woods, more because they're just plain annoying to navigate) The Shrine and the Crypt especially, seeing as they're back to back and they're both the absolute WORST Dark Souls 2 has to offer: being ganged up by a lot of difficult enemies, a lot of which will spam spells at you from a distance, at least 2 at a time with more enemies wanting to break you open like a Soul Piñata.

That aside, things got easier when I finally found more (well-hidden) Lightning miracles. AFTER clearing these areas. For a time I was using Hexes for more viable ways to weaponize Faith, but they didn't really measure up, so I made my character dumber but stronger and maxed out Faith. No more Hexes until I build up Intelligence again, but at least I'm not having trouble anymore. Then again, most Hexes take up 2 attunement slots as opposed to only 1 for most Miracles, and I had forgotten that Dark Souls 2 has Attunement increase spell uses, so in the end I might just stick to Miracles. Gonna miss Dark Storm/Scraps of Life's ability to knock back enemies though. Those were actually useful. And without Xbox Live I'm never getting the Wrath of the Gods miracle

This post has been edited by monkeyemoness: Feb 7 2018, 11:05 PM

Wow, I thought their next game was going to be part 2 of the Warhammer game.

Are you sure, this says Three Kingdoms China. Ok, I see Britannia on their site, coming out in April! Wow, that is soon.

It is part of a new line of Total War games called Saga games. From what little their website says these game will focus on a smaller area, at some major point in history. It looks like the campaign map will be just about as big as a normal TW game, just focused on a smaller area. Britannia is just the UK. But there are a lot more territories in it than in say Atilla.

They're going to compete against Dynasty Warriors 9? Good luck, lol.

Khajiit has never played Dynasty Warriors. Are they any good?

I've not played them all, but man did I put in a ton of hours to DS5, back on the PS2. I still break it out now and again - they are fun hack 'n slash games! The ninth installment is due out this month I believe, and will feature an open world for the first time in the series.

Really looking forward to it.

What’s the subject matter? Is it historical or fantasy (Khajiit believes they have an Ancient Chinese theme, yes?)?

Same as that total war game - it's all based on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

All the characters and stories are inspired by it, and it takes place after the fall of the Han Empire, when three kingdoms are all warring for control.

Nice! It’s kind of strange that this one has never played these games, considering that he is somewhat interested in ancient Chinese history.

It's a ton of fun if you like wading into huge crowds of peons and obliterating them. Dueling other officers is fun, too.

I'm not sure how the story mode works in the later games, but in 5, there were 48 characters that all had a story mode between 4-8 battles.

- 4 for factions unaligned with the three kingdoms (with one exception)
- 5 for most of the three kingdom stories
- 6 for key figures in the three kingdoms
- 8 for the kingdom leaders

And since then, I believe they added many more characters, and even an new kingdom. Zhao Yun is the character featured on most of the box art, and is kind of the flagship guy for the series.

My favorite is Jiang Wei, though. Who wouldn't want to fight with a trident?!

A trident?! Lol, not exactly a weapon this one thinks of when thinking about Ancient China

Not a lot to report Mashinky wise. A number of Foundries are still out of balanced, but in all but in instance that's going to be rather hard to do and might not be worth the effort. I can of course simply reduce the amount of the overabundant resource per train. But I'd have to remember where and when I did so and keep a constant eye on things to know when to restore those loads to normal. Besides, I've done so yet the imbalance somehow reappears. I suspect that stated resource ratios aren't 100% reliable. They only need to be off by one resource unit a train load to eventually throw things out of whack. In any case those foundries continue to earn tokens, so it's not a big deal.

I've an odd occasional train routing issue at one of the few foundries not imbalanced. Once every so often one of two trains sharing a two track line gets confused and ends up on another line altogether, causing all sorts of mischief. I know where pretty much where things have to be going wrong but can't for the life of my figure out why. I suspect it has to be a signalling issue, but all relevant signals look fine to me. I deleted and reset both train's orders (waypoint markers) for that area. Those looked good too, but better save than sorry.

At the very end of yesterday's Mashinky play session it came into my head to spice up a rather mundane passenger run between two self-established towns situated along what I term the "western" edge of my map. This led to me wonder if rivers and streams can be satisfactorily created via bulldozer. (At this stage my map is awash in green tokens so funding an extensive dig is no issue.) Here's an image of the results of one of two short, narrow streams I made, meandering in from map edge. I think it looks darn nice!

Self Created stream extending into "no man's land" off the map.

What's more, to my surprise and delight I found that if we dig down into the blocks abutting map edge the game will on its own extend our work into "no mans land" for an even more realistic looking river/stream! (Map Edge on my image is where the tree line cuts off on screen left.)

I'm going to see if I can temporarily disable terrain editing costs while creating more waterways throughout my large map. (I don't see disabling it for this purely cosmetic purpose as a "cheat.") If not, no big deal. I'll just need to go slow rather than create a lot of waterways all at once.)

A limitation of this approach is that it obviously work only when we dig down into the "water level" layer, so no mountain streams, waterfalls and so on. Still, I think it a nice cosmetic addition.


Friday late morning ADDENDUM:
I created a more extensive waterway this morning. It begins somewhat north of the map's "southwest" corner and meanders its way to not terribly far east from that same corner, flowing around the town Excremento. I call this capture, unsurprisingly...

"The Bridge at Excremento Creek"

"A Baldwin pulled passenger train on the return leg of a short run from Belfast to the town from whence the waterway draws its name, seen as it crosses Excremento Creek. Both town and creek are self created. A 2018-02-09 image, the date the creek first held water." (Excremento and a few other self-created town names, Dungsly to the north comes to mind, are coined in honor of Wolfgang Mozart. I'll let those interested look up the connection on their own.)

"A Baldwin pulled passenger train on the return leg of a short run from Belfast to the town from whence the waterway draws its name, seen as it crosses Excremento Creek. Both town and creek are self created. A 2018-02-09 image, the date the creek first held water."

(Excremento and a few other self-created town names, Dungsly to the north comes to mind, are coined in honor of Wolfgang Mozart. I'll let those interested look up the connection on their own.)


This post has been edited by Decrepit: Feb 9 2018, 04:45 PM

Those railroad pics look amazing!

'Nother thought on Dark Souls 2 as I reach the end of the game: I think it's probably the most content-packed of the three because of the Lost Crowns Trilogy DLC as well as the Scholar of the First Sin update and it's definitely the most...experimental?

I mean, it didn't have the original director that they got back for the finale and it ended up losing the first director hired for it for an undisclosed reason, so I guess it stands to reason that they'd try a lot of things with the series that deviated from the original's. Apparently they even tried to go with a more open-world feel which was ultimately abandoned in favor of the original's world structure. (Which explains the impossible connections between some the areas: the areas that would connect them more logically were cut.) I mean, it even has unique sound effects for spells and the like that were inexplicably replaced with the original game's for 3.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that it goes a long way to explain why it was my most-played Souls game in spite of the third game being better, mechanically. It's definitely unique, in retrospect. Too bad its place in the series' lore and story is practically pointless. :v Honestly if there's one thing I hate about 3 drawing heavily from the 1st's lore is that it ruined the implications that Lordran was gone and mostly forgotten, along with the other lands from the time. The revelation that most of the kingdoms from the original were somehow still around countless millennia after the first linking of the fire is frankly absurd and goes against the overall theme of cycles and decay. But I GUESS it fits 3's "Just Let the Past Go" thing it was going for. idk I'm rambling and incoherent

The Crown of the Sunken King DLC is neat but geeze the content is hard for a Cleric that was having a hard enough time in the base game. You get to fight alits and the last boss of the DLC is even Peryite :U (Well, it's close enough anyways) It also turns out I never did explore the DLC areas as thoroughly as I thought and I ended up finding new things. Like some weird tree that repairs your equipment with a flash of light if you whip it.

Yeah, the game looks very nice in "realistic" mode. If you get real close to something you notice that textures are adequate but not super high resolution. Thing is, by the game's nature you rarely get the opportunity get super close to things, so mid res textures are sufficient.

Couple more Maskinky images centered on trains at self-created streams:

A Baldwin pulled passenger train crosses one of my streams while traveling between to of my self-created towns along the maps "west" edge.

Two Pacific pulled coal trains cross paths at a stream. I can't recall why I assigned Pacifics to pull so small a load. (Two rail cars each.) Gonna need to investigate that.

Friday afternoon addendum:
My eyes played tricks on my. Those two Pacifics pull four rail cars each, not two. Four's still no burden for a Pacific, but in this case I found out that the Toolworks these locomotives deliver their loads to is awash in coal and can't handle more than it does now. Which means the two pictured trains don't need more than four rail cars each.

This post has been edited by Decrepit: Feb 10 2018, 09:06 PM

Welp, my Dark Souls 2 save file corrupted. :v

Luckily I have a backup so my old characters are fine but since this sets me back considerably on my current save I think I'm gonna call it quits. Playing a Miracle-based Cleric sucks. I'm done with this series for a couple of years now.

Not yet playing but a few mins after 0400 began downloading/installing Kingdom Come: Deliverance off Steam. It's a huge DL so gonna take a while over my not so speedy internet connection. No YouTube for poor decrepit me for the duration, unless I want to make KCD download that much longer.

Figured out how to record game footage with OBS last night. Gonna use it to "film" some of my more interesting Mashinky train routes. More interesting to me at any rate. Anyone else will likely find these rail rides a sure cure for insomnia. Don't know that I'll ever post any footage on YouTube. It's pretty mundane stuff. Then again, I'd have the non existent "ride the rails in first-person engine cab view mode" market pretty much to myself...for good reason. Heh

Speaking of Mashinky, I've been devoting myself almost exclusively to establishing and growing towns along the maps "south" and "west" borders. Am also using the in-game terrain editor to create a bit of scenic pizazz along those border town routes. Using the editor costs Green Tokens, but at this stage I'm awash in those so don't fear running low on "cash." Besides being fun to do, these town routes will eventually net me a profit in increased passenger traffic.

ADDENDUM: Was in the midst of a long Mashinky session when I noticed that KCD's download was stalled. Turns out I can't run Mashinky and DL KCD at the same time? Seems odd to me, especially since Mashinky at this stage of development does not have a multiplayer component to interfere with downloads. Oh well, so much for how I was going to spend my time awaiting KCD. (Right now KCD is at the 20% mark, but does that include any day-one patches? We shall see I suppose.

This post has been edited by Decrepit: Feb 13 2018, 02:44 PM

Having a lot of fun with Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. Only just got back into the game, so I've had to restart and am going through all the kind of tedious beginner stuff, but it's still enjoyable

I've gotta say, for a 3DS game it has amazing cutscenes. It's one of the few games I've played where I actually like watching them.

Didn't make sense to me that Steam didn't allow game play during downloads. I dug a little deeper into SETTINGS and found what I needed to change to allow me to play Mashinky while DL'ing KCD, which I did pretty much all afternoon. (I stopped while ago due to game crash.) KCD is at the 95% mark...assuming day-one patches are not needed or are included in the 95%. Looks like it's gonna be ready to go right at supper time. And no, I'm not skipping or postponing supper.

Fun Mashinky session. Created three new towns along the map's "southern" border. None has spawned enough houses to pay for themselves in passenger fare. At least one of the three will be a very slow grower. Maybe all three will be.

Still hooked on Mashinky. Created a new small town yesterday, which spawned its first few houses today. Also finalized my second Mashinky video. Not as pleased with this one as I was with the first. Ought to redo a number of voice-over clips with sound issues, but to heck with that. (I redid a few, but those contained misstatements I felt I shouldn't let stand.)