u/Emergency_Cellist754

Palpatine seemed like a guy who would back up in the cloud

I know the pathfinding makes it almost unplayable in cities at times, I know the hiding and ambush mechanic is broken enough to be useless, I know that some ranged units are so OP they may as well have machine guns.

Some of the units make no sense - german tribesmen phalanxes, german women who just stand around screaming ... all of germania actually. That's before we get to incendiary pigs and British head hurlers.

But it all just feels right. Everything comes together and clicks so well and from the first time I ever marched a unit of hastati and velites into a Gallic town, it remains the most fun game I've ever played. It can take hours of your life at a time and you won't even notice.

I mean the art was okay.

But then the lack of a physical disc, closely followed by the story that they'd be realising a disc in December, blatantly trying to get people to buy it twice in the first two months

And the news that certain stores will only be open to people who pay more (what in the Ubisoft is that)

And some screenshots that I dunno, I'm just not feeling. To me they are not exciting details of advanced customisation, they're just art that has been drawn up. Could be anything.

SHOW US THE GAME. Launching pre-orders with so little of the actual game shown just doesn't sit right with me.

Edit: Well this was illuminating.

Some of y'all are angry, angry people.

The reticule seems to jump up just as I'm throwing, in fact seems to have a mind of its own. I've tried every possible configuration of settings but it persists.

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I just finished a playthrough of 2018 where the aiming worked perfectly, and am now in early game Ragnarok but this is already messing with my enjoyment of the game.

I am kinda out of touch with RTS games but Blitzkrieg was so cool for me as a WW2 nerd. I loved the ability to control artillery batteries, of different types like howitzers and field guns and Katyusha launchers and Nebelwerfers - most other games I've played are all about the infantry and tanks and don't include artillery as a significant element.

They don't get a lot of love - and part of it might be because everything about it is wildly anachronistic and historically, completely inaccurate.

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That's why it's so much fun though.

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A Ptolemaic army would have just been a copy of the Seleucid army but the devs clearly loved Ancient Egypt, didn't care that the New Kingdom was about 1500 years earlier, and just shoehorned a Ramses the Great-style Egypt civilization into the game.

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And the roster is great. Phalanxes or axemen, take your pick of melee style; good cavalry for either light flanking or heavy charges; some of the best archers in the game; and of course the chariots.

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Infuriating to use sometimes, but they will shred enemy cavalry and even having one unit of them on the battlefield will give the enemy a wild morale penalty that can tip the odds.

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(Chariot archers however must be the most useless ranged unit in the game)

That was your life mate.

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"Blimey that was quick, do I get another one?"

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No sorry, mate that's your lot.

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Back to the world of dreams.

This time of year just feels wonky. The sun comes up at 4.30AM and stays up for 18 hours. Unpopular opinion but I prefer midwinter to this. It has me feeling like Al Pacino in Insomnia taping the curtains to the wall.

Some of the ancient sources do mention Numidian kings like Jugurtha and the backbone of Numidian armies was indeed meant to be javelin-armed horsemen.

But how did they actually fight? Did they ride up to about ten feet away and sit there and throw javelins at infantry? Throwing a spear from a horse, especially a moving horse must have been really difficult, especially as stirrups wouldn't be invented for another 1200 years. I can see hundreds of enemy infantry chucking enough rocks, never mind proper projectiles, to make it impractical as a battlefield tactic.

So who knows how accurate they were. Then again I guess they could have carried a good few light javelins and not the 5 or 6 they have in RTW.

But still they seem to have been taken seriously even by the legions and I can't help but wonder what on earth they looked like when they fought.

Maybe they never stopped - hundreds would charge past and just wildly throw, so hundreds of javelins would do some damage, then they'd just circle back and do it again.

It's wild that we still only have *theories* about how ancient melee battles actually worked.