Let's Play XCOM: Enemy Unknown

It's time for another classic game - XCOM: Enemy Unknown!

The Long War mod would make it last about 200-300 episodes instead of more reasonable number like 40 or so, and let's be honest - there's no way in hell I'd be able to finish it. Even people with a lot more time than me left a lot of Long War let's plays incomplete.

I got a bunch of minor mods, two most interesting are:

• Tweaking perk tree, and perk pool for training roulette. This mostly fixes Snipers by making Squadsight the first perk, and delaying Headshot until major-tier perk. It also makes Supports into reliable medics by removing medic skills from the pool.
• Making alien line of sight a bit shorter to occasionally enable ambushes. This could probably be cheesed by the kind of people who like counting tiles, but I never felt like doing so.

The rest is largely UI. Playing on Classic difficulty, so there should be some challenge, especially since I probably forgot everything about the game by now.

The let's play is almost exclusively battles, with base management in between cut out, as you probably don't want to see me alt-tab to spreadsheet and wiki and counting how much power I need to build when and how many corpses I need to sell on grey market to get necessary space bucks for foundry upgrades.

Here's the first episode:

As usual, episodes coming out once a day, same time of the day, until we win or aliens do.

Full playlist is going to be here.

Let's Play Civilization 5 as Rome

It's been a long while since I last recorded any Let's Plays, so here's a new one!

It turns out not everybody switched to Civilization 6, and in fact new mods for Civilization 5 keep coming out. This campaign features one of them - 5th Unique Component. Other mods just as before.

As Rome, our unique abilities are:

• 25% faster production in other cities of every building which is already built in our capital
• Ballista - unique Catapult replacement - slightly stronger
• Legion - unique Swordsman replacement - slightly stronger, can build roads and forts
• Forum - unique Market replacement - +10% Great Person
• Thermae - unique Garden replacement - +1 Science, +1 Culture, +1 Food.
• Aedes - unique Temple replacement - +1 Global Happiness, cheaper to build, costs no maintenance, and doesn't require a Shrine.

Overall these feel like mid-tier or a bit below abilities. Faster production scales with number of cities, and Aedes gives us a bit of happiness breathing room, so together they support a bit of expansion. Unique units come too early and are of wrong kind to have much impact, early wars are dominated by Composite Bowmen supported by Horsemen.

I'd definitely love to hear feedback, especially technical feedback - I'm recording at higher resolution, and I'm not totally sure if I set OBS correctly for it.

One video a day, full playlist going to be here.

How to watch high speed let's plays on London Underground

Apparently the idea that some places - like London trains - are offline - never occurred to anyone in California or Seattle or wherever people who write mobile software tend to live. And even support for high speed playback is not quite as common as it should be.

So I came up with a process to deal with it - which even with all the scripts to automate it still has far too many steps. I'm not saying I recommend it to anyone, but maybe someone needs to do something similar, and they might use it as a starting point.

Download let's plays

First, let's find a bunch of let's plays we want to watch, it's best to use playlists instead of individual videos to reduce URL copy and pasting time, but it works for both.

To download them we can use youtube-dl, which is available as a homebrew package (brew install youtube-dl), or you can get it from here.

$ youtube-dl -t -f "bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best"

  "url1" "url2" "url3"

Youtube offers videos in many formats, and arguments above are what I found to result in highest quality and best compatibility with various video players. Default settings often ended up causing issues.

Speed up the videos

There's plenty of command line tools to manipulate audio and video, and they tend to have ridiculously complicated interfaces.

I wrote speedup_mp3 script (available in my unix-utilities repository) which wraps all such tools to provide easy speedup of various formats - including of video files.

The script uses ffmpeg to speedup videos - as well as sox and id3v2 to deal with audio files if you need to do so to some podcasts. All those dependencies you can satisfy with brew install ffmpeg sox id3v2.

The script can speedup a whole directory of downloaded videos at once by 2.0x factor:

$ speedup_mp3 -2.0 downloaded_videos/ fast_videos/

Adjust that number to your liking. Factors higher than 2.0 are not currently supported, as ffmpeg requires multiple speedup rounds in such case. I plan to add support for that later.

The process takes a lot of time, so it's best left overnight to do its thing.

The script already skips videos which exist in target directory, so you can add more videos to the source, run it again, and it won't redo videos it already converted.

Put them on Dropbox

Infuriatingly there doesn't seem to be any good way to just send files to Android tablet from a laptop over WiFi. There used to be some programs, but they got turned into microtransaction nonsense.

If you already use Dropbox, the easiest way is to put those sped up files there. This step is a bit awkward of course, as video files are big, people's upload speeds are often low, and free Dropbox plan is pretty small.

If that doesn't discourage you, open Dropbox app on your tablet, and use checkbox to make your files available offline. You don't need to wait for it to finish syncing, Dropbox should keep updating files as they get uploaded.

After that any video player works. I use VLC. Just open Dropbox folder, click on the video, it will open in VLC and play right away. First time you do it, make sure to set VLC as default app to avoid an extra dialog.

Isn't this ridiculously overcomplicated?

Yeah, it sort of is. Some parts of it will probably get better - for example speed controls on video/audio playback are getting more common, so you could skip that part (watching at 100% speed is of course totally silly). It still makes some sense to pre-speedup to save space and battery on the device, as faster files are proportionally smaller, but if you feel it's not worth the hassle, you can probably find a video player with appropriate functionality.

TfL showed zero interest in fixing lack of connectivity on London underground, and mobile ecosystem assumes you're always online or everything breaks, so this part will probably be a major pain point for very long time.

The part I find most embarrassing is lack of any builtin way to just send files over to a device. Hopefully this gets fixed soon.

Let's Play Organic Factorio

I wanted to play some more Factorio - this time trying to use "organic" inspired design, like:

• independent cells, with loops containing all materials inside
• bloodstream where everything gets all ingredients, and into which all products are output
• transport enzymes between cells
• no dead ends - everything is just loops connected with other loops

And definitely no logistics robots (except for personal use) or massive buses.

To avoid wasting time, playing with no aliens, and Arumba's Accelerated Starts. Also Bob's mods to require a lot more complex networks of products from my organic factory, and increased saturation applied to make everything look better.

Here's full playlist which gets new episode once a day. First episode is here:

So far it's been definitely challenging, and it forced me to try new and new designs as the organic factory evolves.

Full list of mods used:

• Arumba Lights
• Arumba's Accelerated Start
• Auto Deconstruct
• Auto Trash
• Autofill
• Bob's Adjustable Inserters
• Bob's Assembling machines
• Bob's Config mod
• Bob's Electronics
• Bob's Functions Library mod
• Bob's Greenhouse mod
• Bob's Logistics mod
• Bob's Metals, Chemicals and Intermediates
• Bob's Mining
• Bob's Modules
• Bob's Ores
• Bob's Power
• Bob's Revamp mod
• Bob's Tech
• Bottleneck
• Bridge Railway
• EfficienSee
• Enhanced Map Colors
• Flow Control
• Foreman
• Initial Scan
• Larger Inventory
• Long Reach
• Peace Mod
• Rail Tanker
• Red Alerts
• Research queue
• Shuttle Train
• Tree Collision
• Upgrade Builder and Planner
• Warehousing Mod
• Yet Another Resource Monitor Fork

All mods available from in-game mod system.

Let's Play Civilization 5 on Tamriel as the Khajiit - post-campaign retrospective

Unfortunately due to changing circumstances my Youtube channel is probably going to be somewhat less active for at least first half of the year.

My most recent and so far the only series on it was Let's Play Civilization 5 on Tamriel as the Khajiit, which is now slowly coming to a close, so it's time for some retrospective.

Balance between civilizations

I've chosen civilization based on a quick look at who seemed to have interesting gameplay potential - and also because I haven't played as cats before. I thought other civilizations are gonig to have comparable power level, but it's not ever close, and Khajiit are insanely overpowered. Here's what they do:

• caravan range doubled
• land military units (but not workers, settlers, great generals etc.) +1 movement and +1 sight
• workshop replacement with +2 happiness, +1 culture, +2 science/jungle (stacking with University for +4 science/jungle), on top of the usual bonuses
• caravansary replacement with +2 happiness, +1 culture, double trade range bonus, and the usual gold bonus

In other words:

• ridiculously powerful happiness bonus (+4 per city), all available fairly early in game, making happiness maybe not quite irrelevant, but a secondary consideration even for highly expansionistic empires
• ridiculously powerful military bonus (+1 movement and +1 sight is stronger than most UUs - and Khajiit get it for every land unit in every era.
• To make it even more extreme, Tamriel map is almost all land, so lack of bonuses for ships matters little - and extra movement and sight is still quite effective at shooting ships with your missile units
• Early game the Bosmer whom I was fighting built Great Wall - possibly the most obnoxious wonder in the game - that extra movement point more or less invalidated their wonder
• fairly strong science bonus - requiring access to a lot of judge would make it somewhat situational, but guess what - that's precisely the kind of terrain Khajiit start with in every direction
• fairly strong gold bonus - it's not that huge, mostly it lets you use caravans where others would use cargo ships, which on some maps would be fairly inconsequential, but Tamriel is basically Pangea, so it's especially strong on this map
• modest culture bonus - +2 culture / city is very good value
• and all of that requires very little effort - you start with military bonus and you'd be building workshops everywhere anyway - so now you just need to build caravansaries in places you wouldn't otherwise

This is all "way above Korea and Poland" tier.

It would be all right if everybody had comparable bonuses, but as far as I can tell, everybody else's are rather mediocre.

Back when I was playing Ravnica civs, half of them were really overpowered, but they matched each other reasonably well, and I don't think any of them were Khajiit tier.

This unfortunately means I'm not so inclined to give Tamriel another try. Other civs seem not only underpowered, but also rather boring.

Truce Breaking Bug

Civilization 5 won't let you break truces no matter how much you'd like to do so. However I ran into this bug:

• I wanted to attack Orsimer, but they were a bit strong, so I asked Skyrim to attack them together
• Skyrim said yes, but give us 10 turns
• Well, I couldn't wait, so I attacked Orsimer on my own
• They offered far less resistance than expected, so I took what I wanted and peaced them out
• Next turn Skyrim came back to me with "10 turns is up, let's attack Orsimer together" dialog, and war started.
• As far as I can tell, there were no negative diplomatic consequences of this truce breaking, because game didn't even consider truce breaking to be a possibility

Playing with 13 civilizations

The game had 13 civilizations on Standard sized maps (as opposed to the usual 8), so I expected a bloodbath fighting for what little land there was available. Three civilizations (Bretons, Orsimer, Hammerfell) had their capital so close I'd expect them to DoW each other before getting Composite Bowmen.

It turns out that number of tiles is Standard sized, but amount of land is much bigger, so there was plenty available for everyone - and map had a lot of strategically places mountains to slow down early warfare as well.

Unfortunately 13 civs on Immortal meant it was completely pointless to go after wonders, religions, or domination victory, while making research agreements and science victory a lot stronger.

I think I had 8 research agreements at one point, with +50% science from research agreement thanks to Porcelain Tower stacked on top of +25% from relevant Rationalism policy. That in addition to all my science bonuses, funded by my gold bonuses.

I think 13 civs is generally too many, and it would be better to play with a smaller subset.

Minor mods

I'm increasingly thinking that I should uninstall all promotions mods and just play with vanilla promotions. There's really very little value in it, and it replaces one optimal formula (accuracy/barrage 1-2-3, logistics, range) with another (unlock 1-3, range, unlock 4, logistics).

I'm less convinced that I should be playing with captureable settlers, as that makes things a bit easy with AI stupidity. I still enjoy capturing other great people a lot, so I'd need to customize that.

Other issues

Science victory is a bit boring, so I spent far too much time fighting completely pointless wars late game. I could have finished the campaign a lot faster if I just ignored everybody else and built space ship.

I only just realized I misspelled "Khajiit" as "Khajit". Oh well.

Let's Play Civilization 5 as Wu Zetian of China

My first Immortal difficulty campaign as America went to hell fast for self-inflicted reasons.

I thought I can do a lot better so I started another campaign just as I was done with America - their publication will overlap as I want to keep all my series to one episode per day, and I don't particularly want to delay this one.

So here's the new campaign as Wu Zetian of China. We're playing on China map, and I hand-picked three opponents - Sejong of Korea, Oda Nobunaga of Japan, Genghis Khan as Mongolia. Other four opponents are Casimir III of Poland, Montezuma of the Aztecs, Napoleon of France, and Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon.

That's my second campaign on immortal difficulty, and I'd say it went a lot better than the first one. There were some challenges and minor mistakes, but nothing on the scale of America campaign.

If you want to follow the series, here's the playlist to which episodes will be published, or simply follow my channel.

Mods used are nearly the same:

• (3UC) - 3rd Unique Component
• (4UC) - 4th Unique Component
• Capture+
• City Limits
• Civilization 5 Diplomacy Values
• Colored Religions
• Dynamic NoObsolete Unique Units
• Enhanced User Interface
• Ethnic Units
• InfoAddict
• Less Warmonger Hate
• Meaningful City State Colors
• More Luxuries
• New Beliefs Pack
• Promotions Pack  (manually tweaked for compatibility with UI - Condensed Promotions)
• Quick Turns
• Race for Religions
• Reform and Rule
• Scouts ignore Borders
• Separate Great People Counters
• Show Move-To
• Start with Scout and Worker instead of Warrior
• The Slimline Ancient Ruin Tweak
• UI - Condensed Promotions
• Unlimited Barbarian XP

As for modding changes:

• This time More Luxuries is working, as it was incompatible with Great Plains Plus map used in America campaign.
• I wasn't totally convinced about Reform and Rule mod, but I didn't find a good replacement. I'm open to suggestions, but I don't want to go back to vanilla.
• It turns out Race for Religions massively nerfs religions by moving all the good stuff to reformation beliefs, so religions are pointless if you don't take whole piety tree. I didn't realize that in my America campaign when I had no shot at religion game anyway, but I'm pretty sure I won't be using this mod in the future. Religions are already very weak, they don't deserve more nerfing. And it already overlaps with New Beliefs Pack (which adds more options without nerfing religions), so there's no reason to use both.
• Promotions Pack - it has really good promotions for mounted units (+1 movement per level), and decent promotions for archers (they can get up to +2 range on very high levels, so by the time Archers become Gatling Guns they remain useful) and siege units (similar to archers, except they rarely get very far with levels), but it's really miserable for all other unit types, especially to Swordsmen-line units who never get anything good, and Pikemen and Tanks who both get far worse upgrades than mounted units. I'm seriously considering writing my own mod here.

Another minor thing - during America campaign I figured out how to make custom thumbnails for youtube videos. So now depending on game I might use that feature a lot. Civ5 really needs it, otherwise youtube just chooses diplomacy pics, which is fairly poor idea.

Let's Play Civilization 5 as America (in American)

After successful conclusion of my Polish campaign in Polish, I decided to continue the theme and I'm now starting American campaign in American, on America's home map of Great Planes Plus.

Here's campaign playlist, and here's first episode. New episodes of about 25-30 minutes each are going to be published one a day, at same time (11:00 London time).

Oh and quick warning - there's a lot of swearing for like two episodes when shit hits the fan :-p

Campaign difficulty is now on immortal difficulty level, plus some extra difficulty level introduced by a truly spectacular early game mistake. Just joking, America does not make mistakes, everything went just as planned all along.

The campaign uses mostly the same mods as before, with a few changes, mostly Reform and Rule (instead of Policy+) and Promotions Pack (which is really amazing).

• (3UC) - 3rd Unique Component
• (4UC) - 4th Unique Component
• Capture+
• Civilization 5 Diplomacy Values
• Colored Religions
• Dynamic NoObsolete Unique Units
• Ethnic Units
• Enhanced User Interface
• InfoAddict
• Less Warmonger Hate
• Meaningful City State Colors
• More Luxuries
• New Beliefs Pack
• Promotions Pack
• Quick Turns
• Race for Religions
• Reform and Rule
• Scouts ignore Borders
• Separate Great People Counters
• Show Move-To
• Start with Scout and Worker instead of Warrior
• The Slimline Ancient Ruin Tweak
• Unlimited Barbarian XP

Let's Play Civilization 5 as Poland in Polish - series conclusions

And so, in 45 episodes, the let's play series ended in great Polish victory.

The conclusions are mostly:

• Playing in Polish and using mods are incompatible - I expected that extra stuff added by mods would have English names, but I didn't expect that for stuff that mods changed like social policies, game would display Polish vanilla text over English modded text, so it was totally incorrect, and I needed to have laptop opened next to the game on some forum post explaining how things work in the mod. It was horrible mess.
• If I even get the idea of doing this again, it shouldn't be too hard to write a script to at least detect this kind of conflicts. There's still be the issue of stuff added by mods having English names, but I can live with that.
• It was rather straightforward starting fairly early, so I could bump it one difficulty level for next campaign
• Next Civilization 5 campaign (which just so happens to be starting today) is going to be in English, but I'll record some of the content in Polish in the future.
• Fractal map was pretty cool. It's probably the best "default" map.

Let's Play Happy Factorio with Bob's Mods

I really like Factorio, except for aliens and sad graphics.

I wrote a mod which recolors Factorio to be more cheerful (most recent version downloadable from factorio forums), I wrote a tool to recolorize other mods (it's on github but not really easy to use, ask me if you need it), and a mod to fix night lights and pollution map (I should probably release those as well).

So now the only thing left to do is install a bunch of mods and play. Here's the full playlist, and here you can watch the first video:

New videos, about 25 minutes each, are going to be posted once every day, on same time each day.

Mods used:

• Better Visuals 0.0.1 (unreleased yet)
• bobassembly 0.12.3
• bobelectronics 0.12.3
• boblogistics 0.12.4
• bobmining 0.12.1
• bobmodules 0.12.4
• bobores 0.12.4
• bobplates 0.12.5
• bobpower 0.12.3
• Happy Factorio 0.12.8
• Larger Inventory 1.0.0
• Loot-able Rocks 1.0.0
• peacemod 0.1.0 (I changed json file to make it compatible with 0.12, but it's basically same version as 0.11)
• Terraforming 0.12.1

All mods are available from Factorio Forums.

Enjoy the base :-D

Let's Play Civilization 5 as Poland - in Polish

I tend to be pretty close to 100% English speaking online, but I wanted to record something in Polish - and what could be better than Civilization 5, the only game where Poland is the strongest country of all.

Of course I'm still not terribly happy about sudden death of my Germany campaign to save game corruption. I think the most likely explanation is that mods somehow got upgraded mid-campaign, which is something I might have clicked accidentally. I'll make extra sure not to do so this time.

Anyway, here's the playlist, and here's episode 1:

New videos, about 25 minutes each, are going to be posted once every day, on same time each day.

Tragic death of my Let's Play Civilization V as Germany series

So, this is awkward...

My Let's Play Civilization V as Germany series died a tragic death after 27 episodes due to save game corruption - game crashing to desktop on save game load. Not just the last save game is corrupt, quite a few saves and autosaves before it as well.

No idea what caused it, and the usual fixes like deleting game cache, reinstalling game and mods, and so on didn't work - I'm pretty sure save games are corrupted not game itself.

Earlier save games still work fine, but it would be a bit silly and confusing to redo already published episodes second time.

I'd say the series was fairly entertaining up to this point, with some very unusual strategies emerging that you don't normally see, and which are probably impossible on deity so I'd guess few other let's plays do this. By the time corruption happened I snowballed quite hard, so winning would only be a formality. So if you don't mind it ends abruptly at some point, enjoy the series anyway:

This isn't the first time I had Civ5 crashing, but previously workarounds (like deleting cache) worked.  It's rather discouraging to have campaigns completely corrupted, so I'll probably stop playing Civ5 and try something else instead.

Let's Play Happy Factorio (0.12)

This announcement is really overdue, as I sort of wanted to make this a proper mod first, but instead of waiting forever, I'm just going to announce it now, and release the mod later.

So, here's a new Let's Play series - Let's Play Happy Factorio:

I modded Factorio to use much higher saturation levels, as I find defaults highly depressing. Other than that, it's unmodded gameplay as I started it just as 0.12.0 came out and before mods had any chance to catch up.

Episodes are released once a day, same time (it was originally 6:00, then moved to more convenient 11:00 London time), aiming at 25 minutes per episode.

It's vanilla gameplay on peaceful mode, but you can enjoy watching me struggle with oil based energy instead of traditional solar spam.

When I release it as a mod, it will be announced on this blog.

Let's Play Civilization V as Germany

After very fun Korea science campaign, I decided to try run another campaign, this time domination campaign as Germany.

This time I even made introductory video, which of course contains a massive and highly embarrassing mistake, which I only figured by episode 14. Can you spot it faster? Awards possible.

Series is released one episode per day, same time of day (13:00 London time), about 25 minutes per episode.

I'm using the same mods as in Korea game:

• 3rd Unique Component
• 4th Unique Component
• Capture+ (I'm a bit conflicted about this one, it can be a bit OP)
• Civilization 5 Diplomacy Values
• Ethnic Units
• Extended User Interface
• Historical Religions Complete
• InfoAddict
• Less Warmonger Hate
• More Luxuries
• New Beliefs Pack
• PolicyPlus+
• Promotion Melee Ranged Correction
• Scouts Ignore Borders
• Separate Great People Counters
• The Slimline Ancient Ruin Tweak
• XP From Forts (as far as I can tell, it's not actually working)

Enjoy the game. I'm sure enjoying playing it.

Let's Play Darkest of Days

I decided to add 3rd let's play series to my ongoing  Puzzle Quest as wizard Saneko (every day, 8:00 London time) and Civilization V as Korea (every day, 10:00 London time) series.

Enjoy Darkest of Days - time traveling first person shooter. Release schedule is one episode a day, 12:00 London time.

In the game we'll me traveling to both World Wars, American Civil War, ancient Rome, distant future, and many other times. Enjoy.

This is now a let's play channel

I decided to get a bit more serious about let's plays. I feel going a bit deeper into something is better way to experience it.

So far I finished two series:

• Let's Play series - Civilization 5 as Shoshone - as my first series this invariably ran into endless technical problems, and audio quality for the first 7 episodes is pretty bad, then it gets better, but I guess not that many people want to watch from the middle.
• Let's Play Puzzle Quest as Melniel - it started fine, then I got a disk crash after two episodes, and even though I managed to get old save game file from it, reinstalled game would not accept it. Still could be somewhat entertaining, so if you run out of things to watch, why not.

And of course I ran into all kinds of silly issues, like forgetting to charge my headphones, not testing mod compatibility before starting the game, mid-game hacks, random environmental sounds, completely random publication schedule and so on. That was all fine, it was planned as experimental series.

I never got audio quality to studio quality I'd like to have, but it's decent, and video quality is very consistent 1080p with no glitches.

So now I'm starting some new series, and lessons learned, I'm going to do them much better. First two series are:

• Let's Play Puzzle Quest as Saneko. After her older sister died in a tragic hard drive crash, Saneko continues the quest to save Bartonia from undead monsters. Scheduled for publication one episode a day, 8am London time.
• Let's Play Civilization 5 as Korea. This is my first game at Emperor difficulty, so could be some challenging fun. Links to all mods used in description under each video. Scheduled for publication one episode a day, 10am London time.

I'm trying to have enough recorded and uploaded about one week ahead, so it never skips any episodes even if I'm too busy to record for a few days or there are issues with my internet connection. 

I want to add a couple more series to this. I'm not sure if I'm going to continue everything at one episode a day pace, or try a different schedule. I definitely don't want to go under 2 episodes a day for the rest of the year, each episode generally aiming at about 25 minutes.

I don't have any definite plans, but I'd like to record at least one series in Polish - most will obviously be in English. I'll probably make some non-gaming videos too at some point - gaming is just the most obvious thing to start with, but the video medium can be used for so many other things.

I thought about streaming, but I can't get any internet with decent upload here (2015, London, zone 3, still no way to get fibre optic, come on...), so it would be pretty awful quality - probably not even 720p. There are some games for which it's fine, but mostly I'll just record.

I don't plan to put any facecams into gameplay videos, I find them rather distracting, and there's no good place to put them anyway, as most games use all corners of the screen for relevant UI elements.

Here's the first episode of Let's Play Civilization 5 as Korea:

And the first episode of Let's Play Puzzle Quest as Saneko:

Feedback always welcome. Let's do some playing.

Let's Play Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords

I quite enjoy let's plays, so I decided to start a second series after my civilization V campaign finished.

This time it's the classic game Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords.

I only recorded two episodes (full playlist here). I wanted to continue playing, but due to hardware failure I'm not sure if I'll be able to recover save files.

This series definitely has much higher silliness to gameplay ratio than Civilization V.

Regardless of my success with save game recovery, I'll definitely make more let's play videos. It's really a lot of fun, even if very few people are watching.

Let's Play Civilization V as Shoshone - post-campaign retrospective

So I finished my first Let's Play campaign and I thought it's good time to have a retrospective on mods I used. It's not yet all uploaded, at my upload speeds it will take until next era for that to happen.

• 3rd Unique Component and 4th Unique Component: Adds extra unique components to each civilization — I liked that. 3UC/4UC seem to be on fairly low power level, so there's nothing crazy, but they made civilizations a bit different. Definitely yes.
• Capture+: Allows capturing all civilian units — I really liked how early game it hugely increased stakes with capturing settlers. Capturing great generals on the other hand, that's a bit silly. Probably yes, or something similar.
• Caravansary Trade Routes: Adds extra trade route for each caravansery built — It makes wide empires somewhat better, it added too much busywork with trade routes for my taste. There's probably some strategy to exploit those extra trade routes hard, I just used them in most straightforward way. Probably no.
• Civilization 5 Diplomacy Values: Displays numeric values of diplomatic modifiers — I'm not terribly familiar with how much AI cares about different things, so I definitely like that. Definitely yes.
• Ethnic Units: Extra civilization specific textures for units — It doesn't matter, but it looked nice. Definitely yes.
• InfoAddict: Displays more statistics — It was extremely useful, it's silly how base game. Definitely yes.
• Less Warmonger Hate: Reduces warmonger penalties and makes them decay faster — Other civs seemed to hate me just fine in the end, and it felt reasonable mid game before I went on warmongering spree. Vanilla warmonger hate gets pretty extreme sometimes. Probably yes.
• More Luxuries: Adds more unique luxury types — The biggest technical failure of the campaign, as I really needed this one, and it didn't actually work due to conflicts with Natural Wonder Overhaul. Definitely yes.
• Natural Wonder Overhaul: Adds more natural wonders — It's a good idea, but it conflicts with much more important More Luxuries. Definitely no.
• New Beliefs Pack: Adds more beliefs. — That made religion game much more interesting at no downside. Definitely yes.
• PolicyPlus+: Rebalances social policies. — It's straight difficulty increase, as you no longer have easy access to overpowered policies, but it also makes weak policies more viable, so it's more interesting. Probably yes.
• Promotion Melee Ranged Correction: Bugfix for some UU promotion upgrades — That applies to just a few UUs, and a few more 3UC/4UC UUs. I didn't play as any of them, so it didn't really matter, but I can't see why not. Definitely yes.
• Scouts Ignore Borders: Lets scout units ignore borders — It was good for scouts and embarked scouts, and felt really silly for pathfinder I upgraded to composite bowmen in a goodie hut. On the other hand, how many such goodie huts you're going to find each campaign, 0-2? Quality of life is totally worth it. Probably yes.
• Separate Great People Counters: Makes getting one kind of great person not screw up other great people. — Interface for it is really awkward, but it feels like a bugfix. Probably yes.
• XP From forts: Units can get some XP while sitting in forts and citadels (up to cap) — I used it exactly zero times. I guess that's something I could use spare great generals for, especially to train donated city state units. It is annoyingly nerfed on epic speed (not like I used it), which I consider a mistake as such speeds are specifically for more military action, and this is already very weak. Probably yes.
• Extended User Interface: So many UI fixes — I care about UI even more than Arumba. I should maybe make some videos for Paradox too. For Firaxis modders are doing just fine. Definitely yes.
• Warlord happiness on higher difficulty levels — that's one thing I modded mid-game when I realized More Luxuries mod was not working. I feel it goes a bit too far maybe. I probably won't do it next time, but I might do something milder like +1 happiness for extra copy of each luxury resource beyond first.

Making this Let's Play series was a fun experience. Mistakes were made, but life is the real ironman mode. Audio quality started horrible as I tried various settings none of which worked for first 7 episodes, and ended up tolerable from episode 8 onwards, but still not quite as good as I'd like it to be.

I'm not sure yet what I'm going to let's play next, but that's definitely not my last series. If I revisit Civilization V again, I'll probably try higher difficulty level, and slightly different combination of mods.

Thanks for reading, and see you next time.

Let's Play Civilization V as Shoshone - my first experience with Let's Plays

I've been watching tons of Let's Plays, and eventually I decided I'm going to give it a try as well.

The first series I've made is Civilization V as Shoshone. It's 25 episodes in (a few still uploading as I'm writing this), and will probably end up at 40-something.

Recording setup

I thought about streaming, but my upload speed is so awful (at most expensive BT option available) that I don't think I'd even be able to do 720p, and I really dislike watching console quality 720p, so I'm not going to inflict that on anybody else.

I tried a few things, and Open Broadcaster Software seems to be working well enough - I had to increase bitrate a lot from its default low quality settings, but video quality was very good from episode one.

Audio was a much bigger problem. I tried to record a few videos with headset microphone, and it was just awful. So instead I got this Auna MIC-900 USB microphone. And it took a lot of tweaking to get the setup right, audio quality in the first 7 or so episodes is fairly poor - first I had microphone sensitivity too high, so there was constant background noise, then volumes between microphone and different parts of in-game audio (especially ambient sounds like cows mooing etc.) were misaligned, so it was difficult to hear me at times.

I think from episode 8 onwards audio quality is fine as well. It's not super amazing, as there's some background noise like computer fans, and a few times you can hear random sounds like Hangouts message incoming beep (which I eventually figured how to turn off on all devices) or courier buzzing.

One thing I definitely don't want is any kind of facecam. I always found them horribly distracting, and usually there's not even any good place to put them, as all of screen is used for game interface.

The game

Civilization V is a game I have mixed feelings about. Then again, my feelings about games range from outride hatred to ambivalence, so that's probably good :-). I like so much of what they've done, but I was never happy about its happiness system, and how everybody felt depressed if you play anything except very tall game while prioritizing happiness over everything. There's also a bunch of minor things I wanted to change, like balancing social policy trees, and making civilizations more distinct from each other.

Fortunately Civilization V has Steam Workshop support, so it's very easy to install a bunch of mods, and I thought they'd fix all my problems. Unfortunately it turns out the mod I wanted most of all - extra luxury resources - conflicted with another mod I added, and in the end we're back to vanilla happiness mechanics I loathe. So I did what I always do, and modded the game halfway through by setting Warlord level happiness in otherwise King difficulty game. I'm not entirely sure if that was sensible or not.

Publishing videos

I haven't given that much thought. I just use my normal Youtube account (liked with my Google account), I made one playlist, and I just add videos to it as they get uploaded.

They get pretty straightforward titles, one line description, and autosuggested tags.

One thing everybody else is doing that I haven't figured out how yet is to upload a bunch of videos in advance and automatically release them once a day or so - it's really not practical for recording and publication to be in sync, especially if I want to watch the videos before publishing them.

I just use Youtube upload feature on its website, nothing fancy. Due to my horribly upload speeds, it's taking forever, but I'm not going to downgrade to 720p or do anything awful like that.

Future plans

I hope this Let's Play series is entertaining, but it's really mostly just a test to figure out all technical details. I'm not sure where to go from there. I'll definitely record a few more games - just not CK2/EU4, that takes forever, and a lot of time would be spent on alt-tabbing to spreadsheets and such.

I might record a few videos in Polish - it's weird how little I actually speak Polish these days.

One obvious thing to do is record some programming videos, but that would require a different setup, as I really don't want to program on Windows 7 machine I do gaming and recording on.

In any case, it's been tons of fun so far. I doubt any of the videos I make will ever be popular, but as long as I'm entertained and a few people watching them are entertained, it's all good.

Content ID bullshit

Oh yeah, and I already got into Content ID bullshit. Apparently 32 seconds of one 27 minute episode matches "Light Wave - Abaji" playing in the background, and that makes youtube put ads on that episode, with money to be paid to APM Music.

There's similar automatic claim on 3 other episodes for "Blackfoot Nights - Global Journey".

Fuck Youtube for this kind of bullshit. There's not one shred of proportionality here. Sadly they have sort of monopoly on internet video. Imagine if some site like let's say imgur had similar level of power over internet images, and Content ID'd them and then put ads on the images. It's not anywhere remotely reasonable, but monopoly is monopoly and we can't do anything about it, other than turn off all in-game music (which is already paid for when purchasing the game).