I’m certainly not going to be playing it with a controller any time soon, but I love the idea of people being able to play the way they want and exposing the game to a much larger audience.

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It’s pretty gross and unfair that some players had early access to AoM Retold months in advance while other pros didn’t, but that the players with extra access are still allowed to compete in the Red Bull Wololo tournament qualifiers. Either they should have made it available to anyone in the top ~50 of any RTS game who wanted to join, or they should have excluded members of the Players’ Council who had early access from being eligible. He knows he never would have gotten close to qualifying even if it was an even playing field thanks to their years of experience in the old game, but the fact that it wasn’t even was a big morale dampener.

He really thinks the counter system is cool with a lot of depth, but it’s very difficult to intuit with for example some small melee units not being countered by ranged units like they would be in aoe4. It takes a lot more learning rather than being able to intuit.

The Wololo map & civ drafting system was really good.

Seeding the qualifiers based on ladder Elo, with the exception of the top 4 who got directly seeded and were able to practise strategies in private without needing to worry about ladder was “weird”.

God powers shouldn’t be usable straight away upon age-up, to allow opponent time to see what you aged up with and have time to react to it. He says a “top-3 player” agreed with him about this in his chat, and also points to how in aoe4 you can get counterplay by scouting which landmark they’re building, while in aom there’s no way to see they’re aging up or which god they’re going through.

The uniqueness of myth units is one of his favourite things about the game, with their different special abilities.

Some of the human unit counters are awkward, like Poseidon mirrors don’t have a viable option of anti-cav as hoplites aren’t good enough, so both players have to go into full cavalry. He contrasts that to an Odin–Loki matchup where Odin goes raiding cav and Loki can build hirdmen.

Water is weird. He likes the lack of demos, but finds the strength of water myth units too much. And the impact of water on eco is awkward too, since giving up on water after a short battle to go 2 TC can often put you ahead in eco over a player who committed fully to water and won there. But he’s not yet sure if that’s bad or something you have to get used to.

Doesn’t like the lack of trash units, especially for how it affects lower league players.

He loves titans and their ability to help close out a game without being viable as an end in their own right.

He points out the huge swinginess of some god powers like Fimblewinter in team games.

A long section about autoqueue and general RTS theory of multitasking and splitting attention. I actually think he may have finally convinced me over to his side on this point.

AoE3 exists too btw

He’s not yet sure whether he’ll be returning to AoE4 full time or going heavier into AoM, and is taking a break from playing seriously to think about it.

This is what really shits me. “Oh, the sports companies won’t be able to fund themselves.” If that’s true, too fucking bad. Our laws shouldn’t exist to arbitrarily prop up certain industries even when we’ve decided that the industry is causing harm.

But also, it’s just fucking not true. You can make an argument and say “oh but gambling companies fund 60% of the sport league” or whatever number it is, and pretend that banning gambling would cut the NRL’s budget by 60%. But that’s just not how it works. They’re sponsors because they were the highest bidder, not the only bidder. You’d just go to the next highest bidder if gambling sponsorships weren’t allowed. In the short term, maybe a 10% loss of revenue at most. Realistically, in the long term, it’d be negligible.

Same goes for pokies at local pubs and clubs. Australia has 0.3% of the world’s population and 18% of the world’s poker machines. And if you look specifically at poker machines not located in casinos it goes up to a ridiculous 76%. The entire rest of the world doesn’t allow poker machines at local clubs like we do, and their venues do just fine. The cries that venues would die off if they couldn’t have pokies are just nonsense.

even now you can still host your own website / services at home without any specialized gear

Yes, as I said, that’s the only thing I’ve done myself—in particular, at times I’ve run it off of my main desktop, and at other times on a Raspberry Pi with an external hard drive attached—but that’s specifically not what I was asking about because the previous comment was specifically talking about non-developers who might have that basic HTML understanding and just want a server where they can throw up an HTML file and have it served up. A goal that’s more technically involved than a wordpress.com site, but less involved than self-hosting a LAMP stack and running the Let’s Encrypt certbot.

(Plus, of course, the growing prevalence of cgNAT making self-hosting impossible for many people necessitates the use of a hosting company or user-friendly web service.)

Yeah I learnt static HTML and CSS circa 2007, but even then it felt like what we were being taught was very out of date.

I’ve never actually used any form of hosting for my own pages. I’ve run the LAMP stack on my own local server, and I’ve used services similar to WordPress, but never dealt with static web sites hosted by someone else. Do they not make TLS really easy for you in that circumstance?

I really struggled to find today’s. Had to Google a few definitions.

Riding in a road race or crit, or even a time trial, is very different from a commute ride.

But even on commutes it’s really good, depending on how often you expect to be stopping at lights. It’s great in rainy weather where my flats often slip off the pedal, or climbing up the many hills on my commute that necessitate getting out of the saddle.

Edit: also, you backslashed one of the underscores, which is great, but forgot to escape the backslash itself.

I’m not talking about WordPress.org, but WordPress.com. The basic blogging service. It’s all WYSIWYG.

Tell me you’ve never cycled seriously without telling me you’ve never cycled seriously.

Fwiw these days balance bikes are considered better than training wheels for people learning to ride. Training wheels are ok if you actually need to go somewhere accompanied by an adult on a bike, but they’re terrible for learning. They don’t teach you how to steer or balance properly; a balance bike does. In fact, training wheels can teach bad habits that are difficult to unlearn.

Yeah but a basic Wordpress.com site could do exactly the same thing for free. Or for super cheap if you want your own domain.

How so?

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categories.clevergoat.com 🐐

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I think you’re somewhat understanding what Platonic love is. In modern usage, I’d say that Platonic love is a really strong form of love, stronger than could be called friendship, but which lacks a sexual or romantic dimension (or at least lacks enough of those to characterise as a romantic or sexual relationship).

But it might also be interesting to look at what Platonic love meant to Plato. I’m not an expert. Not even close. But my understanding is that he might have meant it to be the most perfect form of love. We have the phrase “platonic ideal” that we use in other contexts to refer to something that is the most perfect version of that thing, and I think Platonic love likely originally meant that, for love. It was love of the body, the mind, and the soul. Not less than romantic love. Not equal-but-different like the modern usage of the term. But instead encompassing everything that romantic love is and more.

But I’ve only read extremely shallowly into this matter, and would love to hear more from someone who really knows their stuff.

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Wow. Puzzle maker got the difficulty completely backwards imo

The flying healer (Caladria) was an Atlantean unit, and the catapult (Petrobolos) is Greek. Hippocrates was the new Greek unit and Onager for Atlanteans, which is more of an anti-building siege unit. It can be a bit confusing because in the original game’s campaign, the “Atlantean” nation was represented by the Greek civ. And the Atlantean civ did get the Cheiroballista which is a counter-infantry unit technically classified as siege.

edit: I loaded up this page and started writing before your edit. The edit appeared to me after hitting “submit”.

Ha! Glad the title worked. I normally abhor clickbait, so I spent a while trying to come up with a title that got across how utterly incredible it felt to watch this game (I was watching it live on Survivalist’s stream, and then switched over to Boit’s which was on a 30 minute delay), while being accurate and telling you what you were going to see. I thought I managed to get both of those better than the official title on YouTube, which is simultaneously both less sensational and less informative IMO.

I played a bit of Warcraft 3 a few years back. Never played any other games in the franchise, but 3 was really fun while I was playing it. I played Night Elves mainly, but dabbled a few times in Undead. Unfortunately never played any Rise of Nations or Empire Earth, but both of those are games I’d really love to see a Definitive Edition of; I’d definitely try them out if that came out. One of those would be 2nd on my list of desired game remasters, just behind Battle for Middle-Earth 2.

Yeah part of the problem with EE was that even if you didn’t buy Tales of the Dragon, the patch they released alongside it added a bunch of unwanted stuff. Giving the Greek civs a mobile healer, the Norse an archer, Egyptians a Classical Age specialist raiding unit, and Atlanteans a long-ranged siege weapon. All of those got removed in Retold.