u/tacopower69

I've played this game like 5 times and am only now learning there is a modding community for it.

All the other lame ass cultures aren't consistent with their own lore, even in the canonical games. Morrowind, meanwhile, is cool as hell and has way more depth and the devs still treat it like an after thought. Wake up, sheeple!

IMO Ashlanders should be split into four different cultures and given more unique mechanics, they are simplified too much in game. The Dunmer houses should have more interesting and unique religious mechanics. Dagoth Ur and the tribe unmourned should rise and conquer Tamriel and turn everybody into flesh zombies.

We should be able to speak for the Law and the Land, and drive the mongrel dogs of the Empire from Morrowind. We should be able to draw power from the heart of Lorkhan and with it awake from the cursed Dream, and through the power of Akulakhan share such liberating contact with the divine to the rest of Nirn.

Not a sixth house cultist or anything, just saying what most of us are probably thinking. Everyone knows the Sixth House is risen, and Dagoth is its glory. Do not fear death. Life is a dream. Blood is a dream. We sleep in one soul, the soul of Lord Dagoth.

If i try to revoke a fief from a vassal and they refuse they automatically declare an offensive war and have to walk all the way over to MY capital in order to achieve their war goal. Meanwhile I can just sit on my ass and wait for the numbers to tick up before i imprison the vassal automatically. This doesn't really seem logical. IMO if vassals are rebelling then it should count as a defensive war for them.

Source is from NBA's ig account: https://www.instagram.com/p/DakpzFRSRsz/

Usually I play with top 500 players. Made a new account and have been grinding with it from the bottom. Made it through the "elo hell" of gold fairly quickly. Things I noticed from players in gold and below.

1. Not understanding the strength of dev cards and ows builds. This over corrects in diamond where I think players think OWS is stronger than it is, but I see now that over correction is a response to people underestimating the strat completely at low elo. It is very easy to roll through low elo just taking OWS whenever you can.

2. over spending for marginal settle spots. I let a guy plow me to some random 6 pip spot because he gave me a 4 for 1 for it. that 4 for 1 >>> whatever utility you get from that spot. I'll see low elo players be like one card off of a city and port their ore away to get a settle. It's bizarre.

3. Horrible threat assessment. I basically never get robbed when I should. People don't really seem to understand that production is more important than straight points unless the game is close to ending. The settled out road player on 7 is not a threat vs the chunked up two city guy with 5 points and 2 down devs. In fact you WANT that settled out road player who cant city easily to keep road and should avoid over robbing them. This concept eludes low elo players. Aside from those cases I actually do not understand the reasoning for most robs and blocks they seem basically random, as do the tiles blocked. Someone will get solod on a tile that doesnt matter instead of getting blocked on a shared tile that is extremely important (like their only source of grain).

4. Lack of cooperation. This also happens at high elo so not really a thing against low elo players only. I think its just hard to coordinate through text vs irl when you can communicate easier.

5. suboptimal plays in general. If you have a 6 wood spot and only a 3 brick spot and you have 5 brick in hand does it make a lick of sense to port the 4 brick for 1 wood just to put down a road? no. I will see people port away their rare resources one turn then overpay for it the next.

6. Not prioritizing ports. 3:1 ports are great and basically always worth getting. Ideally your third settle should be on a 3:1 port most of the time unless you are doing a specific 2:1 build or there's another great spot you are racing for.

7. weird placements. Sometimes the placements make sense but I think I can predict how the board will place at high elo about 50% of the time whereas at low elo it's closer to about 10%. I don't really know what specific advice I can give here since there doesn't seem to be an easily identifiable pattern to these placements.

8. bad trades. many players dont trade even when it's in their obvious interest to do so then turn around on their turn and over spend for the exact resource they were offered moments ago. I think trading is where a lot of the catan skill comes from so just watching players like dandy trade is enough to increase your skill here. As a heuristic you should only be giving 3:1s in very rare cases and most of the time if you have a resource thats rare on the board you can usually get good deals for it. On the flip side its ok to overspend a little for a resource that you don't have much access to.

Curious to hear what other people think or if they have noticed similar trends. It is my opinion that a good player can achieve a 40+% win rate at low elo by exploiting these tendencies unless they are very unlucky, and it would be interesting to see really good catan youtubers like dandy drew play more games with noobs to see how they adjust their strategies.

Ideally exposition should emerge organically from the plot, but exactly what form does this take for you in practice? Dialogue? Narrator asides? Do you rely on an appendix/glossary?

I'm not a serious writer or anything, I'm just writing out a source book for a short dnd campaign I may end up running for my friends and found it much easier and more fun to write the source book as a short story rather than a traditional encyclopedic campaign document. I've now run into an issue where I've focused on the story too much and neglected the actual worldbuilding detail (whoops) and am now looking for a better method in between a pure narrative and those boring source books that are more like reference documents.

The first was an epic journey were you really felt the distance between settlements. I understand the second has a larger scale, but I think the epic adventure loses a lot of its appeal when it ceases to be an actual adventure.

You travel from distant place to distant place with only quick summaries of your travels. I was shocked when the novel handles your odyssey to shelmek in the middle of the desert with like 2 paragraphs where it alludes to a much more interesting adventure than the game permits you to have, including an encounter with a character that was hinted to be super important in the first game. Apparently you got the chance to meet her and even attend her funeral but the game completely glosses over all of it.

I don't know, man. The tone is just so different from the first game. I really like Kyle Marquis' other games, particularly night road and book of hungry names (though BoHN suffers a little bit from having a weak antagonist) but I'm just not feeling pon para 2.