Wait, that Sandy Petersen? Sure enough, it's him. Never knew he worked on AoE after Doom.

When your other example is a fictional Bible character and your explanation is "I guess God did it" a more rational explanation for how someone surrounded by military experts won battles seems obvious.

Sorry, how did Joan demonstrate that?

Sorry, I don't follow.

Jesus gives military advice

Martial: +20

If Joan of Arc had a heart, would she give it as a gift?

Interesting read. Don't remember if I ever finished the campaign, but I can remember the first mission at least.

Didn't understand the importance of this campaign to history back then. It ended 100 years of war after all.

I think she just accidentally demonstrated why Joan should be considered a figurehead and not a general.

I see.

I guess the world is healing. :)

It’s not exactly an RTS. You get missions which are mostly auto scrollers where three chibi characters shoot their way through a 2-minute-long hallway. Success is just based on how much you’ve leveled up your characters, though you can control when to activate their unique abilities. The rest is just random story content and funny extras.

I did not know that a concept like "anime RTS" exists.

I truly am getting old.

I love the visuals in this one. Concept is pretty unique if a bit kitschy.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2587620/Dinolords/

Direct Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/410900/Forts/

Steam DB: https://steamdb.info/app/410900/

Do we need to emphasize not locked behind a day one DLC?

Sure, but currently India is represented as a purely Islamic culture. The only civ within the entire Indian subcontinental region is the Delhi Sultanate. And they're adding a variant civ which is just one specific dynasty within the Delhi Sultanate. So it has no Hindu representation whatsoever. Which is an even worse representation than claiming it's 100% Hindu as a matter of history, and in the current Hindu supremacist culture in India, the problem is just amplified.

If they wanted to make a variant civ to represent Hindu India, they could do it. It might face that cultural backlash, but "variant civs" have already been used for political bodies that aren't directly related to their parent civ. All "variant civ" means is that they share a lot of game mechanics. Abbasids and Ayyubids are both Islamic, but don't have a lot in common beyond that. Holy Roman Empire and the Order of the Dragon (which is most associated with south eastern Europe) are likewise only tenuously connected. Making a Chola Dynasty civ as a variant of the Delhi Sultanate would not feel great IMO, but it could be done, and would be better than not having any Hindu representation in the game.

Presenting a India as an Islamic civilization would not go well.

That being said, a purely mainline Hindu perspective is also not really representative of India, it's a very diverse place.

A bit of a shame that the new civ in India is also Muslim, considering the majority population are Hindu and they have been clamouring for a Hindustani civ. But I guess it makes sense they wouldn't want to present the Hindustani civ as a "variant" of the Islamic civ, just for the optics (since that's not at all what "variant civs" actually means).

Man, I keep reading it as Dragonshart

In Age of Empires II, I'm like a general shouting, "everyone please just go in there and attack!" when I attack move all army.

My army sets off but then gets distracted like, "ooh cool let's set this house on fire". Then the opponent rolls in so I'm shouting "Horsemen, Archers, Infantry, you fucks, go attack that guy over there"... so the attack group all goes to fuck that guy in particular while having potshots taken at me from all over. It's chaotic and I feel like an incompetent commander.

Likely a skill issue on my part, but maybe they will fix some things to make it easier or more intuitive after I've been playing it for 20 years.

First one was pretty but somewhat dull, anyway there is already BAR and it's better in every way.

So another benchmark dressed up as a game?

Huh, I wouldn't have thought to post this here, but I guess it is a game of strategy that's played in real-time.

But yeah, OpenFront is great fun! I didn't realise it was a fork of WarFront, I've never heard of that one before. The game I would have compared it to is Territorial.io, which is a much simpler/more basic territorial control browser-based strategy game.

Chronicles is a game-within-a-game in aoe2. Sort of like a total overhaul mod, which lets you play a new campaign set in classical Greece, outside the time period aoe2 is mostly set in, with unique period-appropriate units and mechanics. The implication when it came out was that it would be an ongoing series.

It's been developed by Capture Age, a separate company from the main aoe2 developers, mostly known for their Capture Age utility that makes spectating and casting aoe2 games better, and for having developed similar in-built tools for aoe4 and aom. Capture Age has apparently laid off several workers thought to have been associated with Chronicles, not long before a rumoured second Chronicles-related DLC will release. The thought is that there probably won't be more Chronicles after the next one comes out.

Pretty sure the same filter is in use in aoe4 and aom, because I've seen similar problems in those games.

Also fun fact: the filter is all done in your client. If you open up a recorded game file in a text editor, you can see what was actually written. Or at least, that was the case during the aoe4 beta, which is the last time I did that.