#mg-twitch

[mossquillgames]

Crusader Kings Twitch Streams 10/23-10/24

oh boy. haha.

so I have three for these two days, which shall henceforth be referred to as one, two, and three. (up for 7 days? twitch claims 14 but this seems to be a lie...)....two is....no. just...I very nearly deleted it. It has major issues. but if you want to skip the part with the wrong scene active and watch me flail around as king I suppose you can have the link to two. But it’s not...it’s bad ok.

featuring accidental kingship, my usual way of playing, embarrassing technical issues, and as par for the course: dramatic events.

ok technical difficulties notes on One and Two: steam does this thing where updates often screw up the display on my laptop for some reason. it happens with at least one other game where before the update all is well and afterward some part of the screen is cut off even though I didn’t change anything and the settings are the same. so it did that with CKII and I didn’t notice right away with stream One and couldn’t do anything about it really because troubleshooting took restarting as CKII doesn’t let you change anything without restarting the game. And then I forgot for stream Two and similar issue. So you’ll notice that the bottom is sort of cut off on those two. I am aware and it sucks but I fixed it for Three and it should be fine going forward unless there’s an update...

BUT ON TO THE GAME!

they’re my islands.

I start out in Orkney because mostly reasons but also in general I don’t wanna be King, I don’t want to do combat, and I am comfortable in Orkney. It’s a Duchy and Duke is quite enough for me.

Additionally in the first part of One you can see my basic strategy: attract talent and redheads. The redheads is just a personal goal. I try to end up with a family and court with as many redheads as possible because...I....don’t have a reason actually, I just do. If you aren’t going to take advantage of most of the game you need an arbitrary other goal, I guess.

I also am a vicious matrimonial marriage arranger. It’s how I get myself into so many dramatic messes with inheriting lands in all the wrong places. But the reason I do it is that it’s a very effective way to get your dynasty all over the place. Sons are great for inheriting your lands, but you want your daughters and female relations out there basically usurping everyone else’s. Or I do anyway.

all his children are belong to us.

I do try a little harder than usual to make more advantageous marriages in terms of net prestige for my family, but I sort of accidentally stumbled into some early good fortune in who I got to come to court and it snowballed....

Of course this sort of marriage was never used as much as the game lets me get away with but shhhh.

For stream one, I play through the first two of my rules. You will notice that in the beginning of the game I have a naming scheme for the kids--first generation is all A names, second is all B names. This falls apart of course pretty quickly because my kids name their own kids and don’t follow the plan, but it helps me keep track of who’s who a bit better.

there’s kings consort and then there’s kings regnant...

My second ruler of the night was this guy and his wife ended up Queen somehow (I wasn’t paying close enough attention her family) so he became King, but only in the consort sense and that’s fine. In terms of ruling he was still just a Duke and I was cool with that. It was indeed good to be the King in that context. Nice hat, get to be called king, but the Duchy is all I have to worry about.

Though that will get...more complicated as things go on due to this marriage....

They had only daughters which was excellent because it meant that due to the succession laws, his eldest daughter got to inherit upon his death.

so ends stream One.

Stream Two....*buries face in hands*

ok so in addition to the display issue not being sorted, there’s an additional technical thing that happens AND I lose control of the game haha. Only mostly in terms of what I personally am trying to do but I end up King of Norway which is absolutely not what I enjoy. And end up reverting to a previous save in Three to make it stop.

so the big technical issue with two is that when I set up the hot keys for the twitch software I really wasn’t sure what to use. I wanted things I could remember more than anything and that....I run afoul of in two because of my naming scheme with the kids.

I go to rename the son she has almost immediately and....it cuts to my brb screen. And I don’t realize until someone tells me so you miss her ENTIRE horrific death from childbirth with the next kid.

To sum up what happens off screen, after this kid, she has the opportunity to take a lover and since her husband is in another court I decided she would go for it and she does and gets pregnant. Pretty quickly it’s a difficult pregnancy and she has the opportunity to retreat from public life early. There were two options for that, ‘go into hiding’ style like with most pregnancies, but early, or she could leave the castle entirely. Thinking this meant sort of a country house retreat or something I decided to go for it. Traveling did not help. She became ill, spent money she didn’t have on a healer, gave birth, and...kept bleeding.

I have never played a ruler who died in childbirth before, or well, afterward.

On the one hand, novelty! On the other...long regencies for kids suck.

Things pick back up during her eldest son’s stint as a child Duke. The reason these suck is that the regent has to agree to any decision like all my marriage arrangements and the regent invariably has different goals than I do. they can sometimes be boring to, though this one wasn’t too bad.

while I do my stint as a frustrated teenager who’s regent won’t let him arrange any fun marriages, I also realize I inherited the middle of a Breton kingdom. Thanks grandma. Anyway, this bit of Brittany now being in Norway and controlled by Orkney will absolutely become an issue...

but before that, crusade! The last guy I played during a crusade just never set anyone and the pope got all bent out of shape about it for sommmmme reason so I decided to see if I could get away with sort of pretending to send some troops. This mostly worked though mostly because I basically just sent them, accidentally, so they did see some battle and then I couldn’t find them and...idk. There’s a reason I don’t do military in anything ever.

crusade!!!!!.....s are confusing. we won?

anyway so after that eventually I grew up, got married, and started making all those marriages I couldn’t whilst a minor and then...

this guy want the middle of his kingdom back. and gets it. and I then start a campaign to try to get it back through marriage and/or assassination except THEN...

I am suddenly KING OF NORWAY and take several moments to figure out wtf. And he died in the middle of some war and I don’t do combat. So then you get to watch me chase the Saami all over the peninsula trying to be king.

I hate being king.

I did give it a go but ugh.

finally we can throw Two away and pretend it never happened!

Because for Three I go back to my save when Beate inherits the Duchy and hasn’t yet died do to childbirth and try to learn from my mistakes...

first thing I do is sort out the display issue so three no longer has part of the bottom of everything cut off!....but I make the hotkey mistake AGAIN. so there is an interlude where I’m playing away and it’s the brb cat screen. and I don’t even remember what specifically happened because it was less dramatic.

Duchess Beate take two. She lives a long live and arranges SO MANY marriages.

Also mostly just due to the random events of the game, I keep my middle of Brittany holding this time. But it’s ok because I have other lands in weird places that get taken away haha.

I do better at crusading without crusading, I think I still did like one battle or something but then went home and the Pope wasn’t mad.

one thing that gets set up though is the further connection with the Keivan Rus, which seemed like a good idea at the time but may make me King of THAT later which....noooooooo.

Under her son it’s more of the same though I do realize the folly of my entanglements and start focusing more on red hair. I also end up having to arrange more marriages within the dynasty because the family is getting unwieldy. One presumably should do that carefully but I do it what’s convenient.

At one point someone takes the Loon place away from my family and I start a campaign to get it back via marriage and assassination because that’s what I do. I mostly only care in this case cuz...Loon!

anyway, this run goes much better in terms of me not ending up King (yet) and I swear I’ll be better about the hotkeys if I stream it again.

[mossquillgames]

Caesar Twitch Stream 10/8

available here for 14 days

The First (of No Doubt Many) Failures hahaha...(but it makes for far more interesting commentary?)

ok so this is a map I got stuck on enough as a teenager that in one of my attempts to play caesar since I did actually ask the internet of today for advice.I never really tried implementing it because I got busy or bored and wandered off but the trick with this map supposedly is essentially to live with the natives. As a teen I tried to stay as far away from them as possible and while I got much closer for this run through, it clearly wasn’t enough.

This map has a lot of farm land but it’s inconveniently on a higher elevation and the natives live near the only access. Building mission posts can pacify the natives, but only as long as the Roman emissary walker continues to pass buy their houses. This makes it challenging to make the most of the farm land because you can’t build the bulk of your city near the farm land but not on it. The farms need access to labor (houses), but houses need goods and services that take up more space. Additionally, with nearly on the farmland in a place with only one way yo access it, getting the food to the people gets challenging as each farm only has one delivery person. This limits the productivity of any give farm if the delivery person takes too long to go and come from the farm and granary--even if one ignores the threat of the natives. The natives will destroy any buildings built on their land if they aren’t regularly visited by the missionary.

The way I have set things up in this stream, the natives are not a problem. But building essentially in among their houses could be because if the missionary wanders around on the roads I build for my people, he might neglect to go by the native houses enough and they might start doing fun things like destroying aqueducts which has a tendency to b pretty dire. Any loss of water access devolves housing fast and leads to a massive population decrease which means there’s not enough labor to run anything. It can sometimes be recovered from, but it can also be fatal.

I tried to build on either side of them, but the way I did this didn’t work if indeed it can at all. I never could get the farming turn around time low enough to support a population that could achieve the map goals (mostly culture though prosperity and population too).

I figured it out pretty early on in this stream actually but you can see my attempts to fix the problem since no one likes failure especially not with an audience, however small and silent mine currently is.

I tried putting more housing wherever I could to get the population up, as well as upgrading my housing though I do know from experience that trying to upgrade your housing to get enough labor for anything is a fools errand: better housing means more people but they’re needed to maintain the better housing. In this case you can see me struggle to keep everyone in pottery and then furniture.

The food was still at the root of that problem because you can see repeatedly like in the picture above that my markets just don’t have enough food to keep all my little neighborhoods fully evolved all the time.

Though having little neighborhoods is an issue too because that’s more service workers per smaller population cluster so you are investing more labor in smaller numbers of fancy houses.

When I do this map again next week I will try to address these problems.

The sad thing is that I did about as well as I used to do as a teen overall, if somewhat faster, despite not building my city on the land further from the food. One reason for that is that while that is further way, the larger city you can build on the sort of ‘main area’ means you don’t run into the same issues quite as fast. Though you absolutely do run into them....

[mossquillgames]

Caesar Twitch Stream 10/01

oh these two maps. I’ll be honest, I don’t think I beat Lugdunum as a teenager more than like...once hahaha.

finishing off Miletus was mostly just a matter of stockpiling enough pottery to give upgraded housing a serious chance of getting the population up. I mostly had a good set up, especially for defense. So it was just a waiting game on population mostly though I did make sure not to bother trying until I had the peace rating because I wasn’t sure I could sustain it...

to get the population I had to expand on to the islands which was interesting because I didn’t think it would work but it did!

oh Lugdunum.

The problem I always had on this map before was largely that I was too afraid to build near the natives even once I had set up the mission posts and this used to build very cool cities on the “mainland”. These I could never supply properly, especially with food.  The problem I am having now is labor. Not enough workers...but I don’t want to spread out any farther as it’s hard to keep the food flowing even just like this.

I am probably still too afraid to build near the natives...

the wolves also haven’t condensed. Like the zebra in Miletus, the wolves are a hazard and so I have them contained. But usually, like the zebra, they clump up in a small area usually so you can have a very small walled off area. It’s not an issue really but it’s a bit weird in terms of alllll the times I have played this map haha.

will I be able to actually win next time? will it take hours yet?

who knows....

[mossquillgames]

Pharaoh Twitch Stream 9/29

this featured three maps, the tail end of Abu, allll of Saqqara, and the very beginning of Meidum. for the next 14 days it’s over here, eventually I’ll get the streams archived on youtube but for now:

the first pyramid!....oh boy....

The end of Abu was mostly just a matter of waiting. The challenge in that map is getting sufficient population while also being able to get all the goods they need to them. But there’s actually plenty of space and resources so it wasn’t hard this go around.

Saqqara though introduced the first pyramid and the basic frustration from here on out: it takes a really long time to build those. The mastabas may seem like they take awhile, especially if there’s multiples, but it’s nothing on pyramids. It doesn’t matter how well you plan. The physical reality the game is simulating is that they took a long time to build. But because the game also is a game, there is a beautiful feature where you can get help from the gods so it doesn’t actually take so long you give up and stop playing. I have actually played several maps without that (because I didn’t know it existed...) in the past but given the entertainment aspect of streaming, I’m happy to have that one and you can see that I get several blessings that mean I don’t have to spend as much time or resources on building this monument.

The pyramid may be the biggest and most obvious new thing on this map but there’s also the farms. Up til this map all farms have been built on the Nile flood plain but these are just build on non-flooding fertile land. They don’t have to be irrigated, technically, but it increases their production and frankly makes the planning more interesting. These farms need direct access to the labor pool (near to housing) rather than being run from work camps.

One of the issues my present housing strategy creates comes out a lot on this map which is I can end up with high unemployment--a bizarre novelty for me haha since previous ways of playing always never had enough workers...

Oh! and now I have the blog I can mention The Festival Square!

why do I have this thing out away from the city no connected to anything? surely it’s not supposed to be out there alone doing nothing? Yeahhh, so the festival square is a pain for planning and when I was a teenager I was convinced that festivals disrupted traffic in the city in a way that messed up how the walker system works (which people going to the festival rather than walking by squares I needed them to). I haven’t tested this again because that actually doesn’t seem all that likely, but the thing is a pain and I’m used to sticking it off somewhere I won’t be building. As you can see, it doesn’t hurt anything. If you have it connected to your city when the festivals happen a lot of walkers will go mill around the square.

I do love gold mines, they help so much with finances. Especially when you need to import a lot of stuff and especially especially when that includes burial goods for the pyramid.

Since I don’t like combat, I’ll be building a lot of pyramids...and thus Meidum is also a pyramid map. It’s nice and big and lush though and I only just start the beginning of the city before saving for next time.