Warriors of the North Unit Analysis Part 12: Undead Lizardmen
Necro Lizardman
+50% Poison
resistance, +15% Ice
resistance, -15% Fire
resistance. +50% Attack at night and/or underground, immune to mental effects, and takes 50% more damage from 'holy' attackers. Effects that impose bonuses or penalties on Undead or Lizardmen apply them to Undead Lizardmen as well.
resistance, +15% Ice resistance, -15% Fire resistance. +50% Attack at night and/or underground, immune to mental effects, and takes 50% more damage from 'holy' attackers. Effects that impose bonuses or penalties on Undead or Lizardmen apply them to Undead Lizardmen as well.
... a clear variation on the Undead Ability, though Undead don't have a standardized weakness to Fire, it's just common.
The next Ability is...
Ancient Rage
Anytime this unit takes damage (Except from counterattacks), its Attack increases by 10% and its crit chance by 3, up to a maximum of +50% and +15, respectively.
... basically a weak Rising Fury. (Raising Attack is usually going to be weaker than raising base Damage)
Note that Tirexes don't boost the Morale of Undead Lizardmen, even though Undead Lizardmen are supposed to benefit from anything that benefits Lizardmen. I've... not exhaustively tested what benefits Undead Lizardmen and wouldn't be surprised if the in-game claim that they benefit from everything that benefits Undead and Lizardmen is not particularly true in practice.
And while nothing in the game explicitly says so, Undead Lizardmen are in fact healed by Zlogn and otherwise behave as Undead as far as most healing effects don't work on them and so on. This includes that Plague gives them a Morale bonus, so feel free to mix them alongside Necromancers.
Note that Tirexes don't boost the Morale of Undead Lizardmen, even though Undead Lizardmen are supposed to benefit from anything that benefits Lizardmen. I've... not exhaustively tested what benefits Undead Lizardmen and wouldn't be surprised if the in-game claim that they benefit from everything that benefits Undead and Lizardmen is not particularly true in practice.
And while nothing in the game explicitly says so, Undead Lizardmen are in fact healed by Zlogn and otherwise behave as Undead as far as most healing effects don't work on them and so on. This includes that Plague gives them a Morale bonus, so feel free to mix them alongside Necromancers.
Conversely, they do not increase the chance of Zlogn being generated when a stack is wiped out, unlike regular Undead. You can mix regular Undead with Undead Lizardmen to make it possible, and of course when fighting Undead they'll be providing Zlogn drop chances for you, but if you're fielding Undead Lizardmen by themselves or alongside Neutrals/anybody else that isn't regular Undead you may find yourself wanting to cast the Zlogn Spell to support Vengeful Gorguls, Ram-Thors, or Necroxes.
Morale-wise, Undead Lizardmen are...
-3 Morale for Dragon presence in allies.
... the logical intersection of Undead and Lizardmen: they hate dragons, and that's it.
And yes, dragons hate them back just as hard. Because Lizardmen.
As a whole, Undead Lizardmen are content lifted from Red Sands, though it's not as close in details as you might expect from some of the other Ice and Fire content that's pulled from Red Sands. In particular, Ancient Rage is not an Undead Lizardmen thing in Red Sands! Instead, they're broadly resistant to Spells and to Rage moves, which has the interesting impact of emphasizing the importance of your army over Rage and Spells. It's actually a bit disappointing that Ice and Fire gave them Ancient Rage instead -Ancient Rage really isn't that different from Adrenaline, in terms of making a faction of units pick up in effectiveness even as the battle goes on and they take casualties.
So anyway, units.
As a whole, Undead Lizardmen are content lifted from Red Sands, though it's not as close in details as you might expect from some of the other Ice and Fire content that's pulled from Red Sands. In particular, Ancient Rage is not an Undead Lizardmen thing in Red Sands! Instead, they're broadly resistant to Spells and to Rage moves, which has the interesting impact of emphasizing the importance of your army over Rage and Spells. It's actually a bit disappointing that Ice and Fire gave them Ancient Rage instead -Ancient Rage really isn't that different from Adrenaline, in terms of making a faction of units pick up in effectiveness even as the battle goes on and they take casualties.
So anyway, units.
Vengeful Gorgul
Level: 3
Hiring Cost: 350
Leadership: 110
Attack/Defense: 18 / 18
Initiative/Speed: 6 / 3
Health: 90
Damage: 8-10 Physical
Resistances: 15% Physical, 50% Poison,-15% Fire, 15% Ice
, 50% Poison,-15% Fire, 15% Ice
Talents: Running (Charge: 1. +2 Action Points), Ritual Dance (Reload: 2. Attacks all adjacent units, friend and foe alike, for 7-9 Physical damage, and inflicts Curse for 3 turns on all hit units. Selects a single target that can potentially retaliate)
damage, and inflicts Curse for 3 turns on all hit units. Selects a single target that can potentially retaliate)
Abilities: Necro Lizardman, Cursed Spear (Melee attack can strike two targets at once, with no risk of friendly fire. Inflicts Curse for 3 turns, except against Undead), Rugged Scales (Takes halved damage from non-magical ranged attacks, plus 15% Physical resistance), Horde (+1 Attack and Defense for every 30 members of the stack, to a max of doubling base Attack and Defense. So to a max of +18/+18 in this case), Vengeful (When below half of original size, the unit always crits), Tireless Warrior (Allied Undead Lizardmen all gain +1 to Initiative), Ancient Rage
Note that a rather funny bug is that Ritual Dance is, like Bloody Madness, actually supposed to inflict Bleeding, but is bugged so this doesn't happen... and its description doesn't mention this intended quality, so the lack doesn't look like a bug from the perspective of playing the game.
Anyway, basically take a Gorgul, make it less blazingly fast in turn order, but make it overall a beefier fighter. And remove the need to die horribly before you can perform a spin attack, but also remove the Bleeding infliction. (Due to a bug, but shhh) And get rid of the insanely aggressive Bloodlust in favor of Vengeful and Tireless Warrior. And the standard Undead Lizardmen traits, of course.
Also note that, curiously, they have 2 less Attack but 2 more Defense compared to Gorguls. And of course their resistance setup is overall better, with a weaker weakness, stronger Physical and Poison resistances, and one more positive resistance overall.
Vengeful Gorguls are perfectly good units, but they're not particularly new. They're probably a little better than Gorguls if each is looked at in isolation, but in real terms you'll mostly care about what the rest of your army is. If you're wanting a Gorgul sort of unit while you're running Undead, assuming you haven't maxed Persuasion already, then Vengeful Gorguls are the way to go. If you're wanting to run a more regular Lizardmen army that includes Gorguanas, the living Gorguls are the way to go, especially if you're wanting to use Whisper of the Creator. (It doesn't work on Vengeful Gorguls) Or if you want a Gorgul-y unit but you'd like it to be strongly resistant to Poison and/or hold up better against Ice damage, then Vengeful Gorguls are the way to go. Or if you want a Gorgul-y unit and it's really important it's immune to mental effects; Vengeful Gorguls. Or if you want a Gorgul-y unit and it's important it's susceptible to mental effects (Maybe you want to slap Berserk on it, I dunno), then living Gorguls. But broadly? They play very similarly, other than Gorguls potentially getting extra turns from Bloodlust while Vengeful Gorguls can toss out a no-retaliation splash melee attack without needing to lose half their numbers and all.
So there's... not a lot to actually say about Vengeful Gorguls. They're an okay unit, and they work for adding something to the game, more or less, but it doesn't really give me a lot of nuance to talk about.
Anyway, basically take a Gorgul, make it less blazingly fast in turn order, but make it overall a beefier fighter. And remove the need to die horribly before you can perform a spin attack, but also remove the Bleeding infliction. (Due to a bug, but shhh) And get rid of the insanely aggressive Bloodlust in favor of Vengeful and Tireless Warrior. And the standard Undead Lizardmen traits, of course.
Also note that, curiously, they have 2 less Attack but 2 more Defense compared to Gorguls. And of course their resistance setup is overall better, with a weaker weakness, stronger Physical and Poison resistances, and one more positive resistance overall.
Vengeful Gorguls are perfectly good units, but they're not particularly new. They're probably a little better than Gorguls if each is looked at in isolation, but in real terms you'll mostly care about what the rest of your army is. If you're wanting a Gorgul sort of unit while you're running Undead, assuming you haven't maxed Persuasion already, then Vengeful Gorguls are the way to go. If you're wanting to run a more regular Lizardmen army that includes Gorguanas, the living Gorguls are the way to go, especially if you're wanting to use Whisper of the Creator. (It doesn't work on Vengeful Gorguls) Or if you want a Gorgul-y unit but you'd like it to be strongly resistant to Poison and/or hold up better against Ice damage, then Vengeful Gorguls are the way to go. Or if you want a Gorgul-y unit and it's really important it's immune to mental effects; Vengeful Gorguls. Or if you want a Gorgul-y unit and it's important it's susceptible to mental effects (Maybe you want to slap Berserk on it, I dunno), then living Gorguls. But broadly? They play very similarly, other than Gorguls potentially getting extra turns from Bloodlust while Vengeful Gorguls can toss out a no-retaliation splash melee attack without needing to lose half their numbers and all.
So there's... not a lot to actually say about Vengeful Gorguls. They're an okay unit, and they work for adding something to the game, more or less, but it doesn't really give me a lot of nuance to talk about.
Gorguana Ghost
Level: 3
Hiring Cost: 590
Leadership: 145
Attack/Defense: 20 / 22
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 2
Health: 80
Damage (Ranged): 7-11 Magical
Damage (Melee): 4-7 Physical
Resistances: 50% Physical, 50% Poison, 25% Magic, -15% Fire, 15% Ice
, 50% Poison, 25% Magic, -15% Fire, 15% Ice
Talents: Mark of Blood (Reload: 3. A single target enemy takes doubled damage from all sources for 2 turns), Teleportation (Reload: 3. A target ally is instantly moved up to 3 tiles away from its current position to a location of the caster's choice)
Abilities: Necro Lizardman, Magic Missile (Range: 6), Shackles of Darkness (Ranged attacks have a 50% chance of locking off access to the target's Talents for 2 turns. Level 5 units are immune), Phantom (50% Physical resistance, and can pass through most terrain), Magic Protection (25% Magic resistance), Antimagic Aura (Allied Lizardmen within 2 tiles gain 10 points of Magic resistance), Ancient Rage
Take a Gorguana, turn it into a Ghost, and then make it moderately resistant to the usual Ghost answer of Magic damage. Okay, and replace Whisper of the Creator with Teleportation, but that's more generalized, so hey.
Stats-wise, they really are basically a slightly upstatted Gorguana, though also with their Leadership raised enough that they're actually a little behind when it comes to eg damage output. And they'd be behind on durability except they have pretty bonkers resistances. Though... they're also actually lacking Horde, so their offense is a bit low when compared to Gorguanas and their survivability is leaning on their ridiculous suite of resistances to get by. And Gorguanas already have iffy offenses!
Note that Antimagic Aura doesn't benefit the Gorguana Ghost itself. This includes that separate stacks of Gorguana Ghosts won't bolster each other.
Gorguana Ghosts are a bit more distinctive from Gorguana than Vengeful Gorguls are from living Gorguls, thankfully. They're much tankier, and thanks to being healed by Zlogn you can even get away with taking some casualties and just undoing them with a Zlogn. This makes them useful as emergency meatshields for other, more fragile ranged units. Ancient Rage means they'll even hit harder after all that's said and done! Shackles of Darkness, though unreliable, means their ranged game is a bit less focused on raw damage (Since they can't really hope to compete with Gorguanas there) and more on trying to restrict key targets. Alternatively, you can focus on Mark of Blood and Teleportation; Gorguana Ghosts can help get key targets out of the fight, whether by Teleporting a fast melee unit close enough to block in a ranged unit or Mark of Blooding something to then nuke it. (If possible, try to save Rage or Spell nuking for after Mark of Blood is on someone, if you're intending to use it that turn. And remember: even percentile effects double! A Viking can wipe 60% of a stack, guaranteed, with Hel the Messenger) Gorguana Ghosts are overall a bit more splashable than Gorguanas, even considering how widely Undead Lizardmen impose Morale penalties.
Though do note they lack Bloodlust and so are badly inferior at cleaning up summon spam or any other case of groups of weak stacks. This is one of the biggest advantages regular Gorguanas have over them, as while Bloodlust isn't fully reliable Gorguans are still one of your best options for cleaning up even widely-spaced cases of weak stacks. This can be quite important when dealing with unit types that have at least one Talent not affected by stack size, such as Dryads or Demonesses, and even outside that being able to clean up a stack that's in the way of one of your melee stacks and possibly immediately do something else of use is a big deal. Gorguana Ghosts tend to outperform Gorguanas when you're dealing with eg 5 equally-sized stacks where none of them is a summoner or equivalent, but it's much more biased toward Gorguanas when summons get involved or when attacking castles or any other situation where there's a large number of stacks that's widely spaced.
Note that Antimagic Aura doesn't benefit the Gorguana Ghost itself. This includes that separate stacks of Gorguana Ghosts won't bolster each other.
Gorguana Ghosts are a bit more distinctive from Gorguana than Vengeful Gorguls are from living Gorguls, thankfully. They're much tankier, and thanks to being healed by Zlogn you can even get away with taking some casualties and just undoing them with a Zlogn. This makes them useful as emergency meatshields for other, more fragile ranged units. Ancient Rage means they'll even hit harder after all that's said and done! Shackles of Darkness, though unreliable, means their ranged game is a bit less focused on raw damage (Since they can't really hope to compete with Gorguanas there) and more on trying to restrict key targets. Alternatively, you can focus on Mark of Blood and Teleportation; Gorguana Ghosts can help get key targets out of the fight, whether by Teleporting a fast melee unit close enough to block in a ranged unit or Mark of Blooding something to then nuke it. (If possible, try to save Rage or Spell nuking for after Mark of Blood is on someone, if you're intending to use it that turn. And remember: even percentile effects double! A Viking can wipe 60% of a stack, guaranteed, with Hel the Messenger) Gorguana Ghosts are overall a bit more splashable than Gorguanas, even considering how widely Undead Lizardmen impose Morale penalties.
Though do note they lack Bloodlust and so are badly inferior at cleaning up summon spam or any other case of groups of weak stacks. This is one of the biggest advantages regular Gorguanas have over them, as while Bloodlust isn't fully reliable Gorguans are still one of your best options for cleaning up even widely-spaced cases of weak stacks. This can be quite important when dealing with unit types that have at least one Talent not affected by stack size, such as Dryads or Demonesses, and even outside that being able to clean up a stack that's in the way of one of your melee stacks and possibly immediately do something else of use is a big deal. Gorguana Ghosts tend to outperform Gorguanas when you're dealing with eg 5 equally-sized stacks where none of them is a summoner or equivalent, but it's much more biased toward Gorguanas when summons get involved or when attacking castles or any other situation where there's a large number of stacks that's widely spaced.
Ram-Thor
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 1800
Leadership: 280
Attack/Defense: 30 / 40
Initiative/Speed: 2 / 2
Health: 220
Damage: 16-20 Physical
Resistances: 20% Physical, 50% Poison, -15% Fire, 15% Ice
, 50% Poison, -15% Fire, 15% Ice
Talents: Ram (Reload: 2. Runs directly in a straight line to hit a target with no chance for retaliation, and inflict Bleeding for 1 turn. Distance is current action points+5. Base damage is 16-20 Physical damage, but each tile traveled increases this by 20% of base), Displacement (Reload: 3. An enemy below Level 5 takes 17-22 Physical damage and is knocked back 1 tile, with no chance to retaliate)
damage, but each tile traveled increases this by 20% of base), Displacement (Reload: 3. An enemy below Level 5 takes 17-22 Physical damage and is knocked back 1 tile, with no chance to retaliate)
Abilities: Necro Lizardman, Triple-horned (Melee attacks strike enemies to the side of the target as well, but has no risk of friendly fire), Sharp Horns (Melee attacks always inflict Bleeding for 1 turn), Rugged Scales (Takes halved damage from ranged attacks, plus 20% Physical resistance), Spikes (Automatically retaliates against melee attacks for 8-15 Physical damage, infinitely), Wide Plate (Adjacent allies below Level 5 gain 20% Defense), Ancient Rage
Take a Brontor, remove its Burrow/ranged attack gimmick, and then make it a little more viable as a regular melee unit. Though note they've actually got one less Initiative than regular Brontors. They're pretty heavily reliant on Ram or support -and whaddya know, Gorguana Ghosts can Teleport them into position! Convenient, isn't it?
Ram-Thor's battle model isn't as different from the Brontor as the portrait would suggest -no glowing eyes, for one- and in fact in certain lighting conditions they're basically indistinguishable from a Brontor. It's... kinda annoying, actually.
Unfortunately, you really need to support Ram-Thors to get reliable use out of them, and in particular due to how Trapper and Tactics interact even on open fields Tactics is unreliable for ensuring they can Ram to get to the other side first turn. Displacement is also... kinda gimmicky, as the Ram-Thor itself doesn't want enemies moved away from it, will have trouble pursuing if they decide to head elsewhere, goes so late in turn order it's unlikely to be able to take the opportunity to enter the now-unoccupied space without assistance, and in spite of Displacement hitting harder than its basic attack if you're doing things right it will usually be inferior to taking advantage of Triple-Horned's splash on basic melee. Displacement is only really useful as a way of eg shoving enemies into Traps, and if you're doing things right you've probably gotten Trapper maxed by the time you have Ram-Thors -and even if you haven't, there's other, more generally useful options for shoving enemies where you need them, such as Cyclops. On top of all that, Displacement doesn't inflict Bleeding!
I like the idea of the Ram-Thor, but in practice it mostly tends to be a Brontor But Bad, and the AI in particular is really bad at using it. They won't use Ram unless they start the turn lined up with a target -which is true of Brontors as well, but Brontors only have 1 Speed anyway so it usually doesn't matter- and they're obsessive about using Displacement even when it hurts them and they don't even try to get moved to be lined up for a Ram in future, all of which means it's pretty trivial -given how late in turn order they are- to get your units positioned so they don't get to do anything for several turns. And it gets even worse if you start moving fast fliers back to their side of the battlefield, so they end up deciding to turn around!
The mass Bleeding infliction is pretty cool, at least, and is in actuality probably the biggest argument for considering Ram-Thors. There's other options for inflicting Bleeding, but not for inflicting it en mass, not in Ice and Fire, and mass Bleeding is pretty amazing for supporting Spell-slinging, Rage-slinging, and just generally killing things dead through a combination of percentile damage and the fact that all non-percentile damage's effectiveness is increased against Bleeding targets. It's still clunky to get the Ram-Thor into position, but mass Bleeding is potentially worth the effort. If only for the novelty value.
Take a Brontor, remove its Burrow/ranged attack gimmick, and then make it a little more viable as a regular melee unit. Though note they've actually got one less Initiative than regular Brontors. They're pretty heavily reliant on Ram or support -and whaddya know, Gorguana Ghosts can Teleport them into position! Convenient, isn't it?
Ram-Thor's battle model isn't as different from the Brontor as the portrait would suggest -no glowing eyes, for one- and in fact in certain lighting conditions they're basically indistinguishable from a Brontor. It's... kinda annoying, actually.
Unfortunately, you really need to support Ram-Thors to get reliable use out of them, and in particular due to how Trapper and Tactics interact even on open fields Tactics is unreliable for ensuring they can Ram to get to the other side first turn. Displacement is also... kinda gimmicky, as the Ram-Thor itself doesn't want enemies moved away from it, will have trouble pursuing if they decide to head elsewhere, goes so late in turn order it's unlikely to be able to take the opportunity to enter the now-unoccupied space without assistance, and in spite of Displacement hitting harder than its basic attack if you're doing things right it will usually be inferior to taking advantage of Triple-Horned's splash on basic melee. Displacement is only really useful as a way of eg shoving enemies into Traps, and if you're doing things right you've probably gotten Trapper maxed by the time you have Ram-Thors -and even if you haven't, there's other, more generally useful options for shoving enemies where you need them, such as Cyclops. On top of all that, Displacement doesn't inflict Bleeding!
I like the idea of the Ram-Thor, but in practice it mostly tends to be a Brontor But Bad, and the AI in particular is really bad at using it. They won't use Ram unless they start the turn lined up with a target -which is true of Brontors as well, but Brontors only have 1 Speed anyway so it usually doesn't matter- and they're obsessive about using Displacement even when it hurts them and they don't even try to get moved to be lined up for a Ram in future, all of which means it's pretty trivial -given how late in turn order they are- to get your units positioned so they don't get to do anything for several turns. And it gets even worse if you start moving fast fliers back to their side of the battlefield, so they end up deciding to turn around!
The mass Bleeding infliction is pretty cool, at least, and is in actuality probably the biggest argument for considering Ram-Thors. There's other options for inflicting Bleeding, but not for inflicting it en mass, not in Ice and Fire, and mass Bleeding is pretty amazing for supporting Spell-slinging, Rage-slinging, and just generally killing things dead through a combination of percentile damage and the fact that all non-percentile damage's effectiveness is increased against Bleeding targets. It's still clunky to get the Ram-Thor into position, but mass Bleeding is potentially worth the effort. If only for the novelty value.
Also, note that while the game describes Ram in a manner that makes it sound like it's an infinitely long charge, in actuality it's a variation on the Viking shield charge Talent, just one with +5 to the maximum tiles traveled instead of +1. This isn't hugely important on most battlefields, but it can trip you up if you try to set your Ram-Thor all the way into the back of a standard battlefield opposite from an enemy that will move after the Ram-Thor (Or won't move at all, for whatever reason), and whoops the Ram-Thor will actually stop just short of the target. It's also a very meaningful limitation on some of the rarer long battlefields, where even Tactics 2 might not be enough to let the Ram-Thor Ram something on the first turn, and notably it means that without action point gifting or Speed boosting the Ram-Thor caps out at +120% damage on Ram.
Oddly, the Ram-Thor is another undead unit that secretly has the 'real' Persistence of Mind Ability, making its protection against mental effects more properly complete. No other Undead Lizardman has this quality.
Worm
Level: 2
Hiring Cost: 20
Leadership: 15
Attack/Defense: 7 / 2
Initiative/Speed: 6 / 3
Health: 6
Damage: 1-2 Poison
Resistances: -10% Physical, 50% Poison, -15% Fire, 15% Ice
, 50% Poison, -15% Fire, 15% Ice
Talents: None
Abilities: Necro Lizardman, Burrow (Movement ignores all intervening terrain and units, and a ranged attack can be performed. Attack range: infinite), Poisonous (30% chance to inflict Poisoning for 3 turns), Drain Life (Drains health when attacking, healing itself for 100% of damage dealt and potentially undoing casualties), Eyeless (Immunity to Blind, Precision, and Greasy Mist. Also can detect invisible creatures), Ancient Rage
Basically a Gobot or Adult Gobot, but all Undead-y. And doing actual Poison damage on its attack, which has its situational advantages (eg they'll tend to do better than a Gobot against Knights) but is probably mostly a disadvantage. They've technically lost some Abilities, but most of them are covered by being a Necro Lizardman (eg Persistence of Mind), except for No Melee Penalty... which the fact that it's not listed is strange, as Worm melee damage is in fact identical to their ranged damage. This similarity to living Gobots extends to Worms secretly being unable to miss in melee for whatever reason.
And yes, the Worm lacks the Worm Ability, somewhat ironically.
The awesome fact that they leech at a distance makes them a surprisingly decent ranged attacker for doing stuff like momentarily blocking an enemy and then Burrowing to safety to plink at enemies to get their numbers back up. It's a really neat concept, and it's too bad this is the only game they show up in.
Worms are one of the more faithful-to-Red-Sands Undead Lizardmen, at least once you account for the differences in overall Undead Lizardmen handling. Just a few fiddly details like the Red Sands version doing doubled damage to Dragons. The basic idea of an undead Gobot that has Drain Life and can Poison enemies is essentially the same.
As enemies, Worms should generally either be ignored until other enemies are dealt with or made a high-priority target. Just halfway ignoring them while splash damage catches them is letting them leverage their leech to be a problem, and lets Ancient Rage bolster them to boot. I personally prefer to focus them down, as they're almost never paired up with anything that's particularly more problematic to not focus on first, but I suppose it in part depends on what kind of force composition you've got and all.
As player units, Worms are a really nifty unit. There's stronger ranged attackers, but Worms are really nice for not having every minor bit of damage be irritating, as minor casualties will be undone if you're not fighting the Undead. You can't even access Worms until you're past the most Undead-heavy parts of the game, so while Worms are less appealing when you're trying to do the endgame they have a decent stretch of game to be performing well! They're also a huge beneficiary of Items that directly boost damage, such as the Snowball Regalia (+1 Ice damage to your units) or the Weapon that among other things adds +1 Ice damage to your units. Ice and Fire has a decent selection of such Items, too, so this is highly relevant. If you're considering doing a swarm-y army leveraging such Items, Worms are an excellent unit to include in such a lineup, ending up with insane damage -which makes it even easier to leverage their capacity to tank hits and heal it off!
Basically a Gobot or Adult Gobot, but all Undead-y. And doing actual Poison damage on its attack, which has its situational advantages (eg they'll tend to do better than a Gobot against Knights) but is probably mostly a disadvantage. They've technically lost some Abilities, but most of them are covered by being a Necro Lizardman (eg Persistence of Mind), except for No Melee Penalty... which the fact that it's not listed is strange, as Worm melee damage is in fact identical to their ranged damage. This similarity to living Gobots extends to Worms secretly being unable to miss in melee for whatever reason.
And yes, the Worm lacks the Worm Ability, somewhat ironically.
The awesome fact that they leech at a distance makes them a surprisingly decent ranged attacker for doing stuff like momentarily blocking an enemy and then Burrowing to safety to plink at enemies to get their numbers back up. It's a really neat concept, and it's too bad this is the only game they show up in.
Worms are one of the more faithful-to-Red-Sands Undead Lizardmen, at least once you account for the differences in overall Undead Lizardmen handling. Just a few fiddly details like the Red Sands version doing doubled damage to Dragons. The basic idea of an undead Gobot that has Drain Life and can Poison enemies is essentially the same.
As enemies, Worms should generally either be ignored until other enemies are dealt with or made a high-priority target. Just halfway ignoring them while splash damage catches them is letting them leverage their leech to be a problem, and lets Ancient Rage bolster them to boot. I personally prefer to focus them down, as they're almost never paired up with anything that's particularly more problematic to not focus on first, but I suppose it in part depends on what kind of force composition you've got and all.
As player units, Worms are a really nifty unit. There's stronger ranged attackers, but Worms are really nice for not having every minor bit of damage be irritating, as minor casualties will be undone if you're not fighting the Undead. You can't even access Worms until you're past the most Undead-heavy parts of the game, so while Worms are less appealing when you're trying to do the endgame they have a decent stretch of game to be performing well! They're also a huge beneficiary of Items that directly boost damage, such as the Snowball Regalia (+1 Ice damage to your units) or the Weapon that among other things adds +1 Ice damage to your units. Ice and Fire has a decent selection of such Items, too, so this is highly relevant. If you're considering doing a swarm-y army leveraging such Items, Worms are an excellent unit to include in such a lineup, ending up with insane damage -which makes it even easier to leverage their capacity to tank hits and heal it off!
Winged Shadow
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 490
Leadership: 180
Attack/Defense: 35 / 28
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 5
Health: 140
Damage: 9-15 Physical
Resistances: 30% Magic, 50% Poison, -15% Fire. 15% Ice
, 50% Poison, -15% Fire. 15% Ice
Talents: Embrace of Death (Reload: 2. Does 17 Magic damage to an adjacent target with no chance of retaliation. Up to 60% of the damage is used to heal/resurrect the Winged Shadow stack, assuming the target is a living organism and not a Plant), Scream of Darkness (Charge: 1. All allied Undead Lizardmen gain +1 Speed for 2 turns)
damage to an adjacent target with no chance of retaliation. Up to 60% of the damage is used to heal/resurrect the Winged Shadow stack, assuming the target is a living organism and not a Plant), Scream of Darkness (Charge: 1. All allied Undead Lizardmen gain +1 Speed for 2 turns)
Abilities: Necro Lizardman, Flight, Sharp Beak (If the Winged Shadow is flying in a straight line for at least two tiles before attacking, the hit is a crit), Magic Protection (30% Magic resistance), Wings of Darkness (+1 Morale to all allied Undead Lizardmen), Ancient Rage
Bizarrely, even though the Winged Shadow's portrait only appears to have a different background from the Highterant, the actual battle model is quite obviously different, looking like some disturbing Facehugger thing. Pretty much the opposite of the Ram-Thor's situation.
Compared to a Highterant, Winged Shadows are more of a bulky support unit, clearly meant to be placed in a mono-Undead Lizardmen army, rather than being a fairly generic flying attacker that happens to be able to generate copies of itself in a chain. They actually have 1 less Speed and Initiative -though Scream of Darkness directly makes up for the Speed, kinda- and overall their attacking stats aren't really as good when you consider that they're 30 more Leadership than a Highterant, but on the other hand Embrace of Death lets them fill a role akin to Vampires and Ancient Vampires, if a bit more clunkily.
The fact that Embrace of Death does Magic damage can be useful for letting Winged Shadows contribute decent damage against Physically resistant threats like Knights, which is a bit of an advantage over Highterants.
Overall, though, Winged Shadows are just... Highterants that are a little worse overall but have more advantageous resistances and a different Talent for keeping survivability up. There's not a lot to say about them, and personally I think Highterants tend to be more useful/threatening in real terms unless the opposition is doing Poison damage.
Compared to a Highterant, Winged Shadows are more of a bulky support unit, clearly meant to be placed in a mono-Undead Lizardmen army, rather than being a fairly generic flying attacker that happens to be able to generate copies of itself in a chain. They actually have 1 less Speed and Initiative -though Scream of Darkness directly makes up for the Speed, kinda- and overall their attacking stats aren't really as good when you consider that they're 30 more Leadership than a Highterant, but on the other hand Embrace of Death lets them fill a role akin to Vampires and Ancient Vampires, if a bit more clunkily.
The fact that Embrace of Death does Magic damage can be useful for letting Winged Shadows contribute decent damage against Physically resistant threats like Knights, which is a bit of an advantage over Highterants.
Overall, though, Winged Shadows are just... Highterants that are a little worse overall but have more advantageous resistances and a different Talent for keeping survivability up. There's not a lot to say about them, and personally I think Highterants tend to be more useful/threatening in real terms unless the opposition is doing Poison damage.
Necrox
Level: 5
Hiring Cost: 20,000
Leadership: 2400
Attack/Defense: 52 / 55
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 4
Health: 1000
Damage: 90-130 Physical
Resistances: 25% Physical, 50% Poison, -15% Fire, 15% Ice
, 50% Poison, -15% Fire, 15% Ice
Talents: Primal Fear (Reload: 4. All enemies who are below the Necrox's stack's Leadership and are not immune to mental effects take 20-50 Physical damage per Necrox and also have their current Action Points halved), Eat Corpse (Reload: 2. Destroys an adjacent corpse, fully healing the 'top' Necrox and resetting the stack's Action Point total), Terror (Reload: 4. A target enemy below Level 5 flees 2 tiles away from the Necrox. If they're susceptible to mental effects, Fear is inflicted for 2 turns as well)
damage per Necrox and also have their current Action Points halved), Eat Corpse (Reload: 2. Destroys an adjacent corpse, fully healing the 'top' Necrox and resetting the stack's Action Point total), Terror (Reload: 4. A target enemy below Level 5 flees 2 tiles away from the Necrox. If they're susceptible to mental effects, Fear is inflicted for 2 turns as well)
Abilities: Undead Lizardman, Rugged Scales (Takes halved damage from non-magical ranged attacks, plus 25% Physical resistance), Aura of Suppression (All enemies within 2 tiles that are below Level 5 and are susceptible to mental effects suffer -1 Morale), Frightening (50% chance to inflict Fear for 2 turns with melee attack. An attack that successfully inflicts Fear cannot be retaliated again. Level 5 units are immune), Predator (The Necrox automatically consumes the corpse of any stack it finishes off, benefiting as if it had used Eat Corpse, but without affecting the actual Talent's reload state), Morphing (When initiating an attack, the Necrox gains a 2-turn buff that provides 20% of the target's base Attack and Defense. This effect cannot trigger again until the existing buff fades), Ancient Rage
It's a Tirex, but with even more horrifying amounts of resistance, and replacing the Morale boost to allies with more offensively-oriented supporting effects. Also their Primal Fear reloads much slower, which is a bit surprising.
It's a Tirex, but with even more horrifying amounts of resistance, and replacing the Morale boost to allies with more offensively-oriented supporting effects. Also their Primal Fear reloads much slower, which is a bit surprising.
MAJOR BUG NOTE: This identicalness to Tirex includes that a Necrox finishing off a Burrowed Brontor or a Sheeped unit will crash the game. So don't do either of those.
And yes I'm aware the English version's in-game name is 'Necrohs'. I'm not using that. The internal files call it a Necrox, Red Sands calls it a Necrox, and 'Necrox' is obviously 'necro+Tirex'. 'Necrohs' is an obvious mistranslation, and a rather weird one.
Terror is a bit more powerful than it first sounds, because it will eat the target's turn if they have an upcoming turn. It can still work on a unit whose turn is already over, too, unlike some other Talents that can eat the target's turn, though it won't eat their next turn in that case. It's also occasionally wonky; the unit is supposed to flee from the Necrox, but occasionally they'll charge toward it instead, particularly if their current position means that fleeing 2 tiles backwards would place them out of bounds. This usually isn't a significant flaw, but it's worth keeping in mind, especially if you're trying to use Terror to shove a unit into a Trap.
Morphing is a largely-irrelevant gimmick. It does mean you should ideally have Necrox hit high-Leadership units like dragons before low-Leadership units like Fire Dragonflies, but the impact is sufficiently low regardless you can largely ignore it. It's a bit disappointing and weird.
Overall, you can treat a Necrox as a fairly directly improved version of the Tirex, aside the part where the Tirex provides a Morale boost to allied Lizardmen. The Necrox's increased Leadership means its raw stats aren't going as far in real terms, but its resistances are better, it has an array of useful immunity from being Undead, Morphing does partially offset the stat issue, and Terror is really useful. The main point in the Tirex's favor is the fact that you will pick up a bunch of Tirex eggs from the Lizardmen area and so be able to field Tirex for free, where Necrox cost actual money to purchase initially/undo casualties.
Weirdly, the Ice and Fire Necrox actually has very little to do with the Red Sands version. The Red Sands version was a unit that was very late in the turn order -only 3 Initiative- but had Spell immunity and instead of Terror it could animate the dead. It didn't have Predator, Rugged Scales, or Morphing, nor for that matter Ancient Rage since that's just an Ice and Fire Lizardman thing. So instead of being a kind of Tirex+, it was really its own separate thing, and honestly a lot more interesting. I'm not sure why Ice and Fire did this.
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One thing worth noting is that as far as I'm aware you'll never see a shop selling Undead Lizardmen outside the Marshan Swamp. And I've never seen any shop selling them aside the Frogus castle, at that. Maybe they're actually rarely sold by other sources, but if so I've yet to see it.
As such, without abusing Sacrifice your supplies when you get the Frogus Castle offering units is all you'll ever have, I'm fairly sure. It certainly simplifies keeping track of where to go when restocking on Undead Lizardmen, but the Frogus Castle's stock is, in my experience, not going to last you to the end of the game without Sacrifice shenanigans. It also means staying stocked is a huge pain, at least until you've defeated the Giant Undead Lizardmen and so can access the Marshan Swamp directly from Greenwort. (... which you can't do until after you've completed all of Prince Guilford's Quest objectives, because you're arbitrarily barred from advancing the whole Lizardmen/Marshan Swamp plotline until you're able to talk to Archmage Rezo in a friendly way) Undead Lizardmen feel rather tacked-on, in general. (Which is a bit odd, since they're lifted from Red Sands, where the Snow Elves are almost completely original to Ice and Fire)
And yes I'm aware the English version's in-game name is 'Necrohs'. I'm not using that. The internal files call it a Necrox, Red Sands calls it a Necrox, and 'Necrox' is obviously 'necro+Tirex'. 'Necrohs' is an obvious mistranslation, and a rather weird one.
Terror is a bit more powerful than it first sounds, because it will eat the target's turn if they have an upcoming turn. It can still work on a unit whose turn is already over, too, unlike some other Talents that can eat the target's turn, though it won't eat their next turn in that case. It's also occasionally wonky; the unit is supposed to flee from the Necrox, but occasionally they'll charge toward it instead, particularly if their current position means that fleeing 2 tiles backwards would place them out of bounds. This usually isn't a significant flaw, but it's worth keeping in mind, especially if you're trying to use Terror to shove a unit into a Trap.
Morphing is a largely-irrelevant gimmick. It does mean you should ideally have Necrox hit high-Leadership units like dragons before low-Leadership units like Fire Dragonflies, but the impact is sufficiently low regardless you can largely ignore it. It's a bit disappointing and weird.
Overall, you can treat a Necrox as a fairly directly improved version of the Tirex, aside the part where the Tirex provides a Morale boost to allied Lizardmen. The Necrox's increased Leadership means its raw stats aren't going as far in real terms, but its resistances are better, it has an array of useful immunity from being Undead, Morphing does partially offset the stat issue, and Terror is really useful. The main point in the Tirex's favor is the fact that you will pick up a bunch of Tirex eggs from the Lizardmen area and so be able to field Tirex for free, where Necrox cost actual money to purchase initially/undo casualties.
Weirdly, the Ice and Fire Necrox actually has very little to do with the Red Sands version. The Red Sands version was a unit that was very late in the turn order -only 3 Initiative- but had Spell immunity and instead of Terror it could animate the dead. It didn't have Predator, Rugged Scales, or Morphing, nor for that matter Ancient Rage since that's just an Ice and Fire Lizardman thing. So instead of being a kind of Tirex+, it was really its own separate thing, and honestly a lot more interesting. I'm not sure why Ice and Fire did this.
---------------------------------------------
One thing worth noting is that as far as I'm aware you'll never see a shop selling Undead Lizardmen outside the Marshan Swamp. And I've never seen any shop selling them aside the Frogus castle, at that. Maybe they're actually rarely sold by other sources, but if so I've yet to see it.
As such, without abusing Sacrifice your supplies when you get the Frogus Castle offering units is all you'll ever have, I'm fairly sure. It certainly simplifies keeping track of where to go when restocking on Undead Lizardmen, but the Frogus Castle's stock is, in my experience, not going to last you to the end of the game without Sacrifice shenanigans. It also means staying stocked is a huge pain, at least until you've defeated the Giant Undead Lizardmen and so can access the Marshan Swamp directly from Greenwort. (... which you can't do until after you've completed all of Prince Guilford's Quest objectives, because you're arbitrarily barred from advancing the whole Lizardmen/Marshan Swamp plotline until you're able to talk to Archmage Rezo in a friendly way) Undead Lizardmen feel rather tacked-on, in general. (Which is a bit odd, since they're lifted from Red Sands, where the Snow Elves are almost completely original to Ice and Fire)
An additional issue here is that initially the Frogus Castle will only have three different types of Undead Lizardmen, and it's possible to permanently lock yourself out of the ability to expand its roster. You'll be asked to go find Frogus Squelch and make nice with him: when approached, he'll ask you to kill his brother. If you tell him no you won't do that, his brother isn't evil or anything... that's it. You've screwed yourself out of ever accessing more types of Undead Lizardmen. You have to accept the 'go kill my brother' request to be able to expand your arsenal, even though you don't have to actually go through with the killing! I'm pretty sure this is some manner of bug, but in any event, remember: when Squelch asks you to kill his brother, say yes.
If you are going to insist on giving Undead Lizardmen a proper chance, you'll probably want to get a hold of Necromancers so you can leverage their free recruitment of low-end Undead. You can then Sacrifice those Undead to bolster your Undead Lizardmen numbers without meaningfully costing you gold. Fortuitously, Necromancers work decently well with Undead Lizardmen anyway.
The other issue with making use of Undead Lizardmen is how late they are. If you play the game reasonably naturally, even if you make a point of prioritizing the Ice Garden/Cave of Mysteries for clearing out as feasible, you're not going to get a hold of Undead Lizardmen at all until something like 70% of the way into the game. And it'll take still longer to get relatively convenient access to them, as you can't unblock the Marshan Swamp until after you're done with the plot-minimum elements of Demonis!
Even if you know exactly what you're doing and are willing to heavily abuse the ability to sneak past battlegroups and accept severe casualties in attacking severely out-of-depth fights... it will be a huge pain and still take a surprisingly long time to make happen. Initial access to the Marshan Swamp won't open up until you've completed the primary Lizardmen quest chain -which first requires talking to the Snow Elf king so you're even allowed to fight your way into the Cave of Mysteries, and then requires you do multiple Hero fights in the Cave of Mysteries that are tuned to be pretty rough fights even by the Cave of Mysteries' standards... and then you still can't actually complete this quest chain until you've unlocked access to Demonis, which itself requires punching through a minimum of four relatively tough fights in Darion. And completing the quest chain, such that you unlock the Marshan Swamp entrance in the Cave of Mysteries, still requires you complete a specific fight in Demonis -or more precisely, in Hades.
All of which means there's unavoidably a frustratingly limited portion of the game you can use Undead Lizardmen in, a quality not really shared with any other faction. Even Dwarves, whose actual home territories cannot be accessed until still later, are more accessible in real terms, because there are several shops dotted throughout the early-to-midgame that will have Dwarves, and still others that are allowed to have Dwarves even if it's not guaranteed. It's frustrating, and it's particularly strange because Undead Lizardmen are mostly not designed as a super-faction.... which is a particularly striking contrast with Snow Elves, who are vastly more accessible (You can unlock the Ice Gardens the instant you have access to Istering, which is firmly in the early game) and yet are packed with much more in the way of incredible tools.
By a similar token, to the best of my awareness you'll only ever see enemy battlegroups containing Undead Lizardmen in two cases; one, they're all over the Marshan Swamp, often mixed with Undead. Two, there's a couple of battlegroups that show up in the Cave of Mysteries over by the entryway to the Marshan Swamp. (You have to do some sidequesting to actually gain access to it, unfortunately, and it involves going to Demonis first) It's... pretty frustrating, as it would've been nice for Ice and Fire to have diversified the late game by mixing Undead Lizardmen into Undead battlegroups, and it would've made narrative sense to boot. Or Ice and Fire could've incorporated Undead Lizardmen into enemy battlegroups right away and made it a bit of a mystery ("I've never before seen some of the creatures marching among the dead. Where do they come from?"), and again helped make Warriors of the North a bit less repetitive with its heavy use of Undead battlegroups.
It's probably the most disappointing aspect of Ice and Fire, as there's a fairly obvious opening to do beneficial stuff and... it just wasn't taken.
Alas.
Next time, we get started on Spells in Warriors of the North, starting with the Chaos school.
By a similar token, to the best of my awareness you'll only ever see enemy battlegroups containing Undead Lizardmen in two cases; one, they're all over the Marshan Swamp, often mixed with Undead. Two, there's a couple of battlegroups that show up in the Cave of Mysteries over by the entryway to the Marshan Swamp. (You have to do some sidequesting to actually gain access to it, unfortunately, and it involves going to Demonis first) It's... pretty frustrating, as it would've been nice for Ice and Fire to have diversified the late game by mixing Undead Lizardmen into Undead battlegroups, and it would've made narrative sense to boot. Or Ice and Fire could've incorporated Undead Lizardmen into enemy battlegroups right away and made it a bit of a mystery ("I've never before seen some of the creatures marching among the dead. Where do they come from?"), and again helped make Warriors of the North a bit less repetitive with its heavy use of Undead battlegroups.
It's probably the most disappointing aspect of Ice and Fire, as there's a fairly obvious opening to do beneficial stuff and... it just wasn't taken.
Alas.
Next time, we get started on Spells in Warriors of the North, starting with the Chaos school.
This race is called Necrolizards (maybe Necrosaurians?) in the original. Internal name is funny 'lizardead'.
ReplyDeleteAncient Rage is Fury of Ancients in the original.
Vengeful Gorgul is Gorgul-Avenger in Russian - same word as one used by the Elven archer.
His Cursed Spear curses for 3 turns* and works on both base attack and Ritual Dance.
Tireless Warrior affects ONLY necrolizards, as it's original description correctly tells.
Gorgul-Avenger is not affected by Whisper of the Creator; said talent checks for the single specific unit.
Ritual Dance actually supposed to cause Bleed (just like Bloody Madness and Whisper of the Creator), despite description not mentioning it (similar to, again, Whisper of the Creator). Only, it doesn't work due to a missing parameter string (Royal Snake says hello). It's kinda funny - a feature that is supposed to be here yet both doesn't work and isn't mentioned in-game. A player may never know there is a bug in the first place.
*Cursed Spear doesn't actually uses it's special parameters, instead using default Curse effect. If set to special parameters, it will indeed last for only 2 turns and also won't affect level 5 creatures.
Btw with SO MANY things not working on level 5 creatures, I really think devs should have made an info-ability for them that just tells 'this unit is so cool it's immune to most lasting effects' and than make talents that DO work on level 5 specifically tell about it.
Gorguana Ghost deals 4-7 physical damage in melee. I guess devs just blindly copied it from Red Sands, forgetting that all other ghosts use ice damage type.
Shackles of Darkness won't trigger on level 5 creatures.
Ram-Thor's Sharp Horns work on base attack and Ram but not on Displacement. Makes sense, considering it's animation. It's Bleed lasts for just 1 turn.
Short range of it's version of Ram may be a misprint/mistake; it's normal distance is 50 while Ram-Thor has 5. Than again, it may be a purposeful nerf too; description is just copied, after all.
I'm not sure if it's something I should "fix" or not.
Just like it's living counterpart, Worm can't miss with it's melee attack for some reason.
Vampirism is full 100%.
It misses 'No Melee Penalty' info-ability even in the Russian version. I actually never noticed it before reading your post. It's purely visual through; Worm's melee attack has the same damage as ranged.
And I'm glad to see you didn't underestimated Worm - it's really great unit.
Just ignore the smell.
Winged Shadow is Flying Shadow in the original. Flying here is specifically 'currently flying'/'in the process of flight right now'. I guess this name, along with Wings of Darkness, is supposed to create the idea that in-universe this creature is almost constantly in the air, only descending for attack - and than returning to the sky. Showing it in-game is impossible, sadly.
Magic Protection ability has 30%, not 20%.
Necrox IS Necroh in the original. And it was Necroh in (Russian) Red Sands too.
Frightening has 50% chance to trigger, lasts for 2 turns, doesn't work on level 5 units.
Btw I finally found a dirent confirmation from a guy that worked on both Red Sands and Ice and Fire that they indeed had problems with adapting to new WotN scripts and transferring stuff from AP to WotN. In fact, their problems were so unexpectedly serious that development of the DLC took 8 more month than was planned. Well, they had another VERY serious problem at one point, related to games' inner work and maximum allowed game objects, but it was solved.
DeleteAlso, they were hurt by people saying "you just recolored old units!", because they considered Snow Elves to be a much better designed race that Vikings, even if the latter have new models.
Your words about Necrolizards being accessible to late, not being awesome enough for that time, and being barely available REALLY reminds me about some people's rants on Darkside Elves. :)
Anyway, Necrolizards were unplayable in Red Sands (unless it was changed later?). People asked for them to be made playable in Ice and Fire and got something akin to "We'll think about it" for the answer.
Also, "...it would've been nice for Ice and Fire to have diversified the late game by mixing Undead Lizardmen into Undead battlegroups..." and "...Ice and Fire could've incorporated Undead Lizardmen into enemy battlegroups right away and made it a bit of a mystery..." - YES. FINALLY SOMEONE ELSE SAID IT. Devs clinged to Red Sands' theme of necrolizards being a very special thing, but in Red Sands it was this way for story reasons.
And I like the idea of non-human/dragon undead. Even more so - of undead, created from supposedly extinct creatures.
Necroh also lacks animation for eating, so both Eat Corpse and Predator looks rather silly.
DeleteOh, and Tirex problem with eating Burrowed Brontors and Rams is present for Necroh too.
Got all this added.
DeleteAnd yeah, in assembling these posts in the first place I already felt like the game really ought to have directly stated somewhere that Level 5 units are immune to a lot of disables and whatnot because it's pretty common for individual effects to exclude them -and with you digging through the code and all, it turns out this is far more common than I'd already thought it was, because there's tons of cases the game doesn't actually mention.
It honestly hadn't occurred to me that the Ram-Thor's reduced charge range might be a copy-paste error rather than a deliberate change. And it's at that awkward range where for most purposes nothing would change if you made it infinite, but intermittently you'll get into a fight where it falls just short, and it's frustrating without being balance-purposeful. If it were me, I'd probably leave it alone, but I'm not sure that would actually be the 'correct' thing to do.
The Winged Shadow name bit is a little interesting, and out of battle they do in fact never land... and as tireless undead infinite flight is a reasonable scenario.
I think you might be misunderstanding what I'm saying about the Necrox. The English version has it named 'Necrohs' -as in, the 's' is present in general, that's not me adding an 's' to pluralize 'Necroh'. And 'Necrohs' is just... confusing, ugly, and all too easy to imagine as the product of someone misreading something that's meant to be rendered as 'Necrox'. In conjunction with the internal name being 'Necrox'... I'm sticking with Necrox.
I want to say I've previously heard the bit about WotN's DLC being delayed from unexpectedly delayed from coding difficulties, but I might be thinking of a different game. Neat to have confirmation, in any event.
By the time I got to Red Sands, Undead Lizardmen were at least partially accessible; I was able to buy Worms from an early underground store. So if they weren't player-available originally, either they changed their minds by the time I got there, or the translation patch quietly changed it. Either way, yeah, the handling of Undead Lizardmen is probably the biggest waste of potential in the Ice and Fire DLC; adding an entire new faction of Undead is pretty obviously a good way to stick to 'you fight Undead a lot for narrative reasons' while substantially reducing the repetition, to the point that if I'd been following things at the time of the original releases I would've assumed that's why Undead Lizardmen were being added at all. (And then been even more disappointed when it turned out that no, that's not remotely how they're used)
You still have Gorgul's Tireless Warrior saying it affects Lizardmen and than adding that it works on their Undead analogue as well. It Works only for Necrolizards. No effect on living ones.
ReplyDeleteYes, I misundersood. 'Necrohs' is indeed weird.
Internal name may be the way it is because both Russian and English alphabets have letter that looks like this - "Х". In Russian it sounds like [kh]/hard [h]. In English like [ks]. It wouldn't be the first time devs written something in English but using Russian-like writing.
I agree with on Necrolizards. I kinda overreacted in the previous comment because, for whatever reason, essentially no one shares this opinions. Or is like "oh, I guess it would be nice. Never thought about it". Weird.
Oh, I misunderstood that comment. Corrected.
DeleteAh. So the internal name isn't really Necrox. It sounds like Necrox is still closer in 'spirit' to the spelling than Necrohs, though?
My experience is most people who play games and most people who develop games don't really think about what I refer to as 'design' -players focus on the emotional aspect of 'did I have fun', as far as I can tell largely without trying to identify what *caused* the fun (Or unfun) experience, and developers do the exact same thing but focused on playtesters or the like. Which should be a priority, certainly, but I've always found it a bit frustrating how abnormal it is to think about the design itself given that fun grows heavily out of it -that for example in the King's Bounty games themselves I harp a bit on uneven Skill design in part because wildly uneven Skill quality hurts replayability, not to mention it's just obviously frustrating and unfun to realize ten hours in that getting Glory to Rank 3 was a giant waste of Skill Runes and there's nothing you can do to fix it. I've seen people try to defend serious option imbalances of this sort as 'what matters is whether the game is fun', as if such imbalances don't matter to fun -and sure, that's fine when talking relatively mild design problems (If Skill A can be said to be about 10% better than Skill B, is it really that important to try to 'fix' it if they're still both viable and distinct from each other?), but the thought process tends to go a lot deeper than that. ("Well, sure, Skill A is overpowered nonsense that flattens every challenge the game can throw at you while Skill B is so bad you'd actually be better off not having a skill at all, but isn't ~fun~ the only thing that matters?")
Which is a bit of a roundabout way of saying I empathize with what you're talking about of 'nobody seems to think this matters, and I'm frustrated by this'. This kind of thing is a big part of why Vigaroe exists, in fact.
Not exactly KB related, but...
DeleteSpeaking of option imbalance - there are even cases when devs make it this way on purpose, like D&D 3.0/3.5. One of it's creators actually wrote in his blog that some options were made purposefully bad, as learning to understand what options are useful and what aren't is a part of player's growth. And some things should always be bad to help player learn. The game is not intended for PvP after all.
Reading it was one of that moments when I just pause for a moment and think "...am I really seeing it?". I mean, from my perspective it sounds absurd, but here we have some experienced designer who genuinely consider made parts of his game purposefully bad to be a perfectly normal thing.
Hopefully, KB devs just had problems with evaluating things.
Different theme, but...
Sometimes wrong option evaluating may be utterly ridiculous. Are you familiar with old Dragon Age: Origins? Two of it's Mage specializations can actually be described as "so overpowered* that it flattens every challenge in the game" (it's still can be fun through) and "so bad you actually better off not having it" (using it actually makes your character 'worse').
*To illustrate - I remember reading some poor guy's despair over 40+ tries to kill a DLC boss (Harvester) on maximum difficulty (for the achievement) - to no avail. Right before reading it I got said achievement. On the first try. While ignoring boss gimmick. Guess what specialization my character had.
Or how about Pyrovore unit from Warhammer 40K 5ed Tyranid Codex? It was memetically bad. Such things make me think - how is is even possible to accidentally create something like it?
Yeah, I've heard of the D&D 3.0/3.5 story, and I cringe hard at it, as it's almost like a reasonable statement ("Part of the learning process of a game is identifying what kinds of decisions make sense at all.") only then it gets used as a justification for intentionally bad design. ("We included options that are *meant* to be so awful there's no situation a player should ever take them in, because... we don't think that learning curve will organically exist? I guess?" Seriously, what's the logic here?) And it just totally ignores that part of the compact between player and developer is that players always make the reasonable assumption that if an option explicitly exists, it's meant to have a valid use; if an option is so bad you'll never ever use it, this should *always* be the developer overlooking that it's that bad, not intentionally making an apparently-valid option intentionally objectively awful.
DeleteThankfully, the King's Bounty games seem to have primarily suffered from being an unexplored genre, plus them diverging enough from the obvious inspirations (eg unlike classic HoMM games ranged units can walk about before shooting) that lessons learned from those sometimes don't quite line up. Aside Dark Side having a very obviously butchered development cycle, which itself seems likely to be heavily a publisher-caused thing, each game in the series is overall better-tuned than the last -and even Dark Side has clear attempts at improving the design mixed in among the bugs and whatnot. Some of these attempts are even successful!
I've read an LP of Dragon Age: Origins, but it largely glossed over gameplay. On the other hand, before I ever read that LP I had in fact heard of the vast gulf between Mage specializations, where some players were breezing through the game on the highest difficulty and complaining the game was too easy, while other players were struggling to get through at all on lower difficulties and couldn't imagine the highest difficulty being possible to complete. It's... part of why I read an LP, where I might otherwise have avoided such until I'd gotten to the game myself. I'm not familiar with the details, but when the gulf is so vast... one does have to wonder what happened in development, and more specifically have to wonder what kinds of severe biases were involved, because that kind of gulf is almost impossible to have come about without either an explicit willingness to have severe imbalances or something along the lines of confidence bordering on delusion. ("Of course Option A and Option B are equally valid! I intended them to be, so they are, I don't need to pay attention to the reality of how they're actually playing out!")
It's been long enough since I read up on it I don't remember the full details, but I do recall the Pyrovore being a mix of somewhat-sympathetic (Getting screwed over by the actually-tricky consideration of 'what happens if units are already present at the landing site?') alongside just plain strange. (I seem to recall it having outrageously bad scatter, where people talked in terms of its shots regularly scattering off the table entirely, which is the sort of thing that really ought to have come up in playtesting as a problem that's not acceptable)
About Dragon Age - I can go into details if you want, but the main idea is that the OP specialization allows to take a whole new field/tactical role that you couldn't before, while allowing you to choose if you want to go deeply into it (and become better at it than classes that supposedly built around it) or just add it on top of things any mage can do, with both options being very powerful. It removes the main weakness of the mage as a class and also gives wider equipment choice and is the only mage specialization that provide powerful passive benefits. Passive bonuses of the most are barely noticable. And it takes nothing from you.
DeleteThe Bad specialization just gives you a few abillities that are kinda clumsy to use and that block ALL of your other abilities upon activation for minimal and mostly passive benefits. Which are weaker than ones that OP specialization fives for free. 'facepalm'
Numbers aside, even on paper it should've been obvious that specialization that removes class' main weakness and adds a whole number of options is very strong. And that specialization that doesn't allow a 'mage' to cast 'spells' MUST give something VERY powerful in return. And yet...
I think you are mixed up Pyrovore with someone else. Pyrovore was the flamer unit. It's most known memetic feature was that upon getting killed by Instant Death, it exploded, hitting THE WHOLE BATTLEFIELD with the power of a human punch (strength 3, no AP). Number of times equal to number of models near Pyrovore when it got Instant Death. It sounds pretty stupid and it was so in practice. It was propably intended as "units next to Pyrovore take a hit equal to number of models" or something, but it was worded very wrong way.
Other that that, it was, like I said, a flamer unit (thus short ranged), yet it was really slow AND very bad in melee. In other words, it was nearly impossible to use it - supposed targets were either too fast or would lock Pyrovore in melee with expected result.
Combination of being a very bad unit with the ability that was weirdly specific and either horribly misworded or just very stupid made Pyrovore a living meme. And really, look at it. Even for a person not familiar with the game it should be obvious that: 1) This ability is really strange and 2) Slow short-ranged shooter with no melee skills in an army that have no transport or teleportation does not sound like a good idea. Especially when it costs like a hero.
...Did I just skipped Ram-Thor's Spikes when wrote the comment? It's damage is 8-15. So about 50% stronger that Brontor's.
DeleteWell, if undeath made horns sharper, it's only logical that the same is true for spikes.
Ah, yeah. The classic, inexplicably common 'we gave mages a ton of power with key weaknesses or flaws, then gave them the ability to pretty directly negate those issues, and didn't treat this as a massive gamechanger advantage'. I don't understand why that's so common -and it's conspicuous that it's basically always mages (Or occasionally mage-analogues, like psychic powers in a scifi setting) that get this wonkiness, while melee warriors or archers or thieves or whatever will also get clearly-defined weaknesses or limitations while games are much more reluctant to even so much as let them soften those issues some.
DeleteDouble-checking, I was thinking of the Biovore; I'd not previously heard of this 'Pyrovore's special rule is worded so the logical read is it exploding hits EVERYTHING'. And yeah, digging into it, while the sloppy wording there is relatively understandable, it's not like the Pyrovore was otherwise well-designed... the self-destruct is at least funny in its bad design. The horrible statline attached to a high price point is just... why?...
And yeah, I spaced on the Ram-Thor's Spikes being a thing too. Added that info.
It's usually mages because a mage is usually percieved as 'person+' (and often is in-universe) so to speak while melee fighter or archer is just career/fighting style choice. By itself/in-universe it makes perfect sense to me, but them being different classes (=character options) lead to problems.
DeleteBut this is a problem of class-system (which I like by itself) in general IMO - I mean, when player see choice between something like "just a guy who is good with weapons", "guy who sold his soul for eldritch power", "very angry guy who beat people", "guy who was born with mystical powers" and "crafty guy woth lockpicks", it is obvious there there will some frustration. When mystic guy can learn to masterfully chop people and tank their hits, what is the point of weapon-guy? Or the opposite - weapon guy is the only one who can use most of the weapon types or wear armor. "Um, how exactly being born with special power block one from taking a sword and learning how to use it?" Guy-who-sold-his-soul is way more powerful than Angry Guy - so why the latter in the game in the first place? Guy-who-sold-his-soul is NOT more powerful than Angry Guy? Or even weaker? "What was the whole point of getting occult knowledge and selling one's soul, when just getting some muscles and bad temper is just as effective, if not more?"
It becomes even worse when some classes being more powerful/dangerous is a part of story - indeed making them such gameplay-wise goes against the whole 'calsses as equal options' idea. Not making them means either:
1) Only AI characters of that class are story-powerful while player's are balanced to other class. Which hurts immersion and makes the player feel more like a cosplayer than actual [class].
2) Story-power exist only in-story. Hurts immersion as well and may lead to absurd/funny story/gameplay breaks. And atleast in my experience player often start to ignore story-power or outright see it as in-game propaganda, even if it's supposed to be true in the game setting.
Dragon Age case is especially noticable because of the contrast - "lose your main weakness almost for free" and "block your main strength and get barely anything in return". They are generally considered to be the game's best and the worst specializations respectively. And they are specialization options for the same class.
Speaking of Biovore - remember kill-points? Biovore attacks with Spore Mines, who were considered a separate unit back there. That almost instantly dies. And gives opposing player kill-points upon it's death. So every time Biovore made a ranged attack, it gave free kill-points to your enemy. Biovores were literally a unit that gave enemy victory by shoting at them :)
Of course, a lot of people thought it was idiotic and unintended, but European Team Championship rules decided it indeed works this way - and majority of 'large' clubs looked up to them.
Later Tyranid codices specifically said that Biovore's Spore Mines are ignored for the purpose of victory objectives :)
I've had similar thoughts about mages and just struggle to elegantly encapsulate the whole collage of thoughts I have; that for example I find it incredibly frustrating how it's fairly standard for class systems to present 'angry guy with conventional weapon' and 'master of phenomenal cosmic power' as equal choices and then clearly still want the angry guy to actually be less valid. I'd be fine with stuff like 'master of phenomenal cosmic power class is something you progress to later in the game and is better than just being an angry guy with a weapon', or in a points-buy sort of context I don't mind mages being better than footsoldiers but costing tons more points, or any number of other possibilities; it's the dishonest/gameplay-screwball decision of 'they're equal, except actually they're not and this inequality is deliberate' that I find just plain baffling. (And conspicuous)
DeleteThough part of what I was thinking for weakness-covering is that games routinely make decisions like having 'mages have noodle arms that hit for barely anything in melee' as a primary weakness, and then provide a spell that buffs melee attacking ability substantially, with the design such that it's trivial to cast it just before you need it and so not really have any cost or limitation meaningfully attached to it. (I really hated this about Neverwinter Nights, for example, where the base campaign in particular was designed so a Priest or the like could just buff before walking through a loading screen door; why play a Fighter when a Priest is in real terms just as good a melee fighter and then gets to cure disease and so on?) This is one of the subtle things I like about the King's Bounty games; they're pretty careful with summons (Arguably overly-careful to start), where I've absolutely seen other games go 'the mage leader gets a smaller army in exchange for all that magic' and then ruin it by the mage just summoning far more than they lose in leadership capacity. And it's usually not a thematics thing that makes sense; it's not 'necromancers get to lead large undead armies', it's 'you're playing a traditional blaster caster who explicitly is supposed to win by slinging fireballs, but the devs thoughtless threw in a powerful summoning spell'.
Oh wow, I'd forgotten about reading the 'Spore Mines actively make you lose by giving kill-points' jank. Tyranids have long had serious problems on the tabletop...
Well, Cleric (and Druid) were generally overpowered in D&D 3.0/3.5 (CoDzilla...). In video games Druid was auto-nerfed due to Wildshape being both weaker and limited, but Cleric remained a full progression spellcaster with mediocre (not weak, like wizard or sorcerer) combat stats, all-spells-are-automatically-known-when-ther level-is-unlocked mechanic, best buffs in the game, tons of spells for healing damage/afflictions/debuffs, some powerful instant death spells... Atleast with wizard/sorcerer one needed to understand DC, saving throws etc. Cleric can just brute force through the game - and indeed better than brute-force-themed classes.
DeleteSo NWN, NWN2, ToEE, IWD2 all had silly OP Clerics. In the latter it was common for HoP parties to have 3+ Clerics :) For the recorrd - I never took more than one. Through Icewind Dale 2 in general had horrible class balance.
Yeah, it was common knowledge that poor Tyranids were very different in lore (APOCALYPTIC SWARM) and on game (overpriced and weak with some weirly designed mechanics). Kinda the opposite of Craftworlds Eldar, who were memetic losers in lore from 4th edition on, but often OP on the table.
Um, this discussion already gone far away from Necrolizards, so I'm thinking - may I lead even further away by asking an unrelated question, that will require some context/examples? Or better some other time?
Yeah, the Cleric in particular was kind of ridiculous all-around, but it's still a useful example. Final Fantasy I also has shades of this with the Black Wizard picking up a self-buff to their melee damage that makes them more or less competitive with the proper melee fighters (Depending on which exact version of FF I you're looking at...), and... well... I've just seen it a LOT, and really grown to hate it. It's been a bit of a relief that the trend with video games in recent years seems less blatantly mage-biased.
DeleteQuestions are fine. Ideally I'd figure out some alternate setup for the site honestly, but for the moment it would be pretty inane of me to enforce a 'related to the topic' rule.
Alright...
DeleteRemember me asking about weird-yet-persistant stuff in western fantasy portraylas of not-Russias? Well, I have similar questions about Eastern Roman Empire aka Second Rome Empire aka, as it became known posthumuously, Byzantium.
From Russian perspective, it is seen as, well, better half of Roman Empire that was the center of Ortodox (read: the only true) Christianity, the beacon of civilisation in barbaric Europe (until XI century atleast) and country that for centuries heroically fought against Persians/Arabs/Turks before finally falling, with Constantine XI dying valiantly fighting next to common soldiers. And Constantinople was seen as the capital of the world and the greatest city before Turk "tainted" it.
Romeis (or whatever they are called in English) also kinda gave our (Russian) realm it's new name ('Russia' was how they wrote 'Rus'), symbol of double-headed eagle, tile of 'tsar' and once obsessive dream of bringing vengeance to Turks and freeing Constantinople (we actually came close in XIX century).
Now, they, of course, had their problems, such as ridiculous levels of political intrigues, multiple throne usurpations (as they venerated tsar's role/title/position but not person who took it), love of luxury, vanity and arrogance. Even than, it was seen more like either "this specific bad people put shame on the noble name of Second Rome" or "it's understandably easy to fall to vices well your empire is so awesome".
From what I see from fantasy video games, western perception of Second Rome is VERY different from ours.
In Dominions it's analogue (Pythium) is portayed as decadent land of various animalistic cults (???). They especially strongly assotiated with snakes for some reason. In their history they gone from analogue of christianity to paganism for pretty much no reason.
In Dragon Age Tevinter is supposed to be Byzantium analogue. I didn't even thought about it on my own, as Tevinter portrayed as uber-rasict country with sort of caste society, common use of blood magic (sometimes with thousands of sacrificed victims) and demon stuff, slavery of massive proportions and dream of taking over the world. Majority of their characters are pretty much caricature villains. Also, this setting analogue of christianity appeared specifically from opposition to Tevinter. Oh, and their ancient rulers are the cause of the Blight that tormented world since than and brought Dwarven civilisation to the blink of extinction. Before the third game a lot people believed (or hoped) that it's just in-universe propaganda, but alas.
Oh, and Tevinter destroyed world's oldest culture, stole it's knowledge (which is the real reason for Tevinter's long-time supremacy) and made it's people a nation of slaves that lost most of their culture.
Tevinter also has snakes on it's heraldry.
In Solasta not-Bysantium is known for luxury, obsession with racial purity, slavery (they are the ONLY country in the known world that practice it) and pretty much having antitheism in place of state religion.
Finally, Assassin's Creed: Revelations. Here we have not some fantasy analogue but actual Constantinople, conquered by Turks. This is the series about, among other things, fighting against tyranny, Sultan is away, Byzantine rebels try to fight back, so we... help turks to crush the resistance. Wait, what? Alright, there is occasional mentions that it's not real Romeis but people who cosplay them, so that they would be seen as heroes and legitemate rulers if they take over Constantinople, but usually everyone behave like they are actual Byzantine soldiers. And there are good guys talking about how better and freer the country became after Turks conquered it. Or how Turks have their flaws, but Byzantines were much worse, and basically deserved to disappear from history. Oh, and we have female fighters here, while Byzantine soldiers are all-male.
DeleteFor a moment - it's freaking Ottoman Empire. Where elite troops were created from children, taken as levy from ethic minorities. Empire, that had a vassal state (Crimean Khanate) that had slave trade as 'official' main source of income. Empire, where at the beginning of XVII century 20% of capital's population were slaves. Empire, where sexual slavery was officially forbidden only at the beginning of XX century. Yet, from tthe perspective of this game's creators Byzantines were 'worse'.
Of course, Byzantine throne intrigues were a bad thing, but Turks had a freaking law that allowed and encouraged royal princes to wage wars and kill each other.
And, of course, anyone know about how much more rights woman in general had there in comparison to Second Rome. /s
'Sigh' It seems it became another rant... So, is Byzantium actually assotiated with tyranny, rasicm, massive slavery etc.? And if yes - why? Racism sounds especially random to me - among tsars of Second Rome were Romans, Greeks, Thracians, Armenians...
The only hystorical reason I can find for westerners to hate Byzantium is religious rivalry, but surely is alone isn't enough for THIS?
It would be nice to hear your opinion on this.
I think this is one of those 'modern politics retrofitting themselves into ostensibly historical contexts in an obviously nonsensical way' sorts of things. Nazi Germany branded itself as the Third Reich -ie the third Rome- and so coopted a lot of classic imagery of imperial Rome, such as heavy uses of eagles, and so now a lot of stuff that's ultimately distinctively Imperial Roman imagery has become associated with Naziism and so on, with Naziism of course being really explicitly racist. So you get fiction that's ultimately really just about politics in the last hundred years -Nazi Germany, neonazis that are still around, etc- that's sort of cosplaying as these ancient cultures because there's enough visual overlap for it to call to mind the thing that's actually being talked about ("Naziism is bad") while the superficial trappings look like something completely different. ("Ancient Rome was really racist, man")
DeleteAmerican fiction also gets this very muddied by the fact that the US also blatantly patterned itself heavily off the Roman Empire, borrowing eagle imagery, deliberately making major state structures look like ancient Roman buildings (As they look after centuries of wear and tear...), where a given story might be using Rome as a Nazi stand-in, might be using Rome as a general US stand-in, or might be using Rome as an American Neonazis stand-in. (I wouldn't be surprised if, say, the UK has this same sort of problem, given the origins of the region, but I'm not familiar enough to say whether it is so)
Notably, you brought up Dragon Age, and one of the things that stood out hard to me in reading the Dragon Age: Origins LP that probably wouldn't have come across this way to you is that the elves of Dragon Age look to be an EXTREMELY thin metaphor for how the native populations of North America got treated by colonists, and continue to be treated in modern-day America and Canada, where the elves are the native populations and Dragon Age humans are the European colonists/modern-day Americans and Canadians. So that's an example I'm fairly certain on of a Dragon Age game blatantly depicting something that concerns the intended audience while dressing it up in just enough of a fantasy cosplay that probably a lot of people think it's not that.
And in the case of Byzantium, it gets a lot less 'press' in American -and probably western as a whole- fiction. It's not the Rome 'the West' considers itself to descend from, so the people who care about Byzantium as a place in its own right tend to be Hardcore Rome Nerds; US history books will talk about Rome 'falling' at the point that the WESTERN Roman Empire came apart at the seams, for example, and only grudgingly, later in the book, acknowledge that also there was that Eastern Roman Empire that carried on pretty well for several more centuries. So I imagine that part of what's happening is that you've got people who want to do Evil Rome as a stand-in for Naziism or whatever, and hey, there's that Other Rome that nobody knows about, so we can be 'historically accurate' by using them, and then nobody is going to get mad at making them really bad because it's that Other Rome that Nobody Cares About.
And then actual historical accuracy gets in the way of the *real* goals of the project, so it gets quietly shoved in a dumpster and set on fire.
That'd be my guess, though keep in mind I'm not personally familiar with most of the examples you're using. (Or only limitedly familiar; I've read some LPs of Dominions, but don't have a good grasp on it overall)
This is the first time I hear about assotiationg Nazi with Third Rome. It also sounds very jarring because Third Rome was Moscow officail title since the time of Grand Prince Vasiliy III (son of Ivan III and Sophia Palaiologina, niece of Constantine XI).
DeleteIn fact, I'm pretty sure that term 'Third Reich' (created or atleast populated by Arthur van den Bruck) was called this way as third after (un)Holy (not)Roman (not exactly)Empire and short-lived German Empire (which called itself 'Second Reich', among other things).
I hope you won't take personal offence at that but US taking after Roman Empire always felt ridiculous to me. Of course, Americans propably think the same about my country.
Bioware actually said that Thedas elves are stand-in for Jews. And Humans are various European nations. Fereldans are Brits, Orlais is France, Tevinter is Byzantium, Qunari play historical (not cultural) role of Arabs and Turks...
I find it strange, personally - Jews' history of hardship is pretty different and not nearly as horrible IMO.
Through speaking of things that come across differently for different cultures - back when people still waited for the release of the original game, I remember Russian players expecting there to be Noble Elf origin. When it was revealed that there are no such things as Elven Nobility at all, it made Thedas Humans feel way more racist that was thought before. Reason for this was that historically when Russia conquered something, local nobles retained at least some of their power and holdings. Even when defeated enemy was really hated (like some of Khanates), it's people, may have been forcibly moved out of their own former capital and stuff, but some nobles STILL retained their titles and got a chance to serve new rule (which they usually took). By default some modern people think that this was deafult behavior for most countries of that time, so Thedas humans were seen as super-hateful towards elves for no reason.
I kinda want to ask a thing about Native Americans but think it come close to political, so...
Again, I don't want to insult you but from our perspective collective West descended from people who 'destroyed' Western Roman Empire.
And Eastern Roman Empire existed until XV century. I'd say it's way more than "several more centuries".
And it was the most rich and powerful European country for quite some time. At around IV-VI centuries it's capital alone had population of hundreds of thousands people.
Still, thank you for your thought on the matter. Personally, I would never guessed about Eastern Romans = Nazi association. It still feels absurd to me but it surely explains a lot of things.
Btw, you may find it amusing - there are people here who believe that westerners HATE Eastern Romans since the old times, and that any hate towards Russia is continuation of this. But alright, enough of this.
Also, speaking of mage biass - I think part of it comes just from once existing stereotype of "players=nerds", and thus will kinship towards mages.
DeleteOther reason is that physically helpless mage is, well, helpless against magic-resistant/immune enemies. In theory there can be special spells for such enemies, but than they can become way too specialized. Or OP. I personally believe that in RPG fully magic immune enemies should be non-existent or atleast reeeeeeeally rare, but hey, just adding option for a mage to temporally (or not...) become a good fighter is much easier.
Mages also usually have limited resources, like mana or spell slots. Without them mage is often nearly useless. Fighters, on the other way, always can do something in combat. Thus comes the idea that spells must be very powerful and/or allow mage to have a melee mode as a backup.
Another reason (from an actual game designer) - mage usually is a more complicated class than average and have higher learning curve to use effectively. Thus people who make effort to learn should be rewarded for it.
There is also general way of thinking that fighter is boosted by both leveling and equipment while for mage equipment is generally not as strong help, so his base capabilities should be better instead. I agree that is was often true in some very old games, but this days we can usually expect a lot of good magic-boosting items, and yet... Than again, we have Dark Souls 3, where spell damage was balanced with the expectations that player will use atleast 2 ring slots (out of 4) on magic-boosting rings. As result mages pretty much have only 2 ring slots as without rings spells are too weak. And it was outright funny at release, when a mage with a Raw weapon (no scaling from stats but higher base damage) could deal higher damage that with spells.
Also, about equipment - there is idea, used in all Dark Souls and Dragon Age 2-3, where spells damage is based on weapon (staff) that mage uses. This is supposed to make finding better weapon just as important for mages as for fighters and to limit magic power by limiting access to better staffs, but I personally hate it immersion-wise. It feels like it's the stick that makes magic happen, not my character.
Also, propably a Russia-exclusive thing - for some unexplainable reason people who fight (so to speak) against pro-mage biass are often really assholish. Like "I know everything better than you", "my opinion is inherently more important that everyone else" or sometimes going deeply into the opposite way, like "in balanced game no offensive spell should have higher damage than fighter melee attack; and this is only if the spell uses resource, is single-targeted, has no additional non-damaging effects and can be used no more often than once per 3-4 fighter attacks. And overall number of known spells is severely limited, of course". It's actually almost a quote from a guy I knew. So you can guess why people either neutral or pro-mage here.
To be honest, I've always found all the longing for The Glory Days of Ancient Rome just... weird. I broadly get how it started, in that the Western Roman Empire collapsed and much of Europe went through a 'dark age' where lots of technology was lost, quality of life went down, etc, where the populations in the immediate aftermath of all that going 'wow, this sucks, I miss Rome' makes sense to me, but then you skip well over a thousand years later and a notable chunk of the world is *still* hung up on the idea that Rome was super-great and we should all endeavor to be more like Ancient Rome? What?
DeleteLike, western fantasy is really big on making a fantastical form of the Fall Of The Roman Empire, where once upon a time there was a world-spanning super-empire, it had super-great technology/magic/magitechnology, and then it fell for some reason and the narrative informs us that our modern fantasy world is but a pale shadow of its greatness that can never surpass that old empire, only ever strive to become almost equal to it. And this is basically exactly the kind of thing Europeans actually literally believed for centuries after West Rome collapsed, even as stuff like farming technology actually pulled ahead of West Rome's peak.
I've long found myself drawn to foreign fiction when it comes to stuff like the fantasy genre (And scifi... I *hate* how often scifi contrives for there to be Ancient Space Rome Aliens whose empire collapsed and who the story insists was superior in every way to our feeble modern space empires), and this kind of thing is a notable chunk of why; if I want to escape this stupid longing for the glory days of The Fallen Roman Empire, I largely *have* to go looking further afield.
So for one thing actually I've personally always found the US cribbing from ancient Rome weird. And I've only found it weirder as I learned enough to know that this is an absolutely terrible way of setting one's country apart from the UK, given the UK is what it is in no small part because Romans moved in and then Rome falling wasn't particularly disastrous to the area. (In part because they were already very distant)
Anyway, I'd totally buy some Bioware employee claimed DA elves are based on Jews, but they map really directly to the native populations of North America, both in terms of facts on the ground (Colonial powers moving in, killing lots of them, deliberately trying to destroy the culture of the survivors...) and in terms of stereotyping. (Native Americans get stereotyped by US and Canadian fiction as being 'close to nature', 'respecting the natural order', 'living a natural life as hunter-gatherers', etc; the strange thing about Dragon Age elves so closely mapping to native North American populations is the part where it's not more common in pop culture, not the part where it happened in this game) And there's a cultural quality I'm not I'll manage to properly explain -that realistic and frank discussion of the native populations and how they've been treated and continue to be treated is a quietly-agreed-upon taboo topic.
Like, to try to give some context, when public school was 'teaching history' to me, the topic of the native populations of North America was carefully presented in a very misleading way; I got to read about how the Conquistadors interacted with the Aztec Empire, and how colonists fought a lot with 'Indians', but while the books didn't directly lie about these events they presented them in a way that occluded points like "yeah, the 'Indians' were fighting back against invaders stealing their land, mass-murdering them, and otherwise being pretty awful to them", obscured that the Meso-American empires were actually pretty sophisticated and large until Europeans showing up murdering them with a mix of Smallpox and deliberate genocide (Some of it based on deliberately infecting natives with Smallpox!), and completely failed to communicate that any native populations still existed; as a kid, the story I was fed was a lie-in-spirit of Europeans finding a lot of great and *totally unoccupied* land, moving in and getting attacked a lot by completely unreasonable local barbarians (But the land was unoccupied, honest!), and then conveniently these barbarians just ceased to exist at some point. (When actually, no, they didn't, and also it wasn't so much 'convenient' as it was 'a concerted effort at genocide')
DeleteAnd this approach to the topic carries through into how US and Canadian pop culture tends to approach the topic of the native populations; they aren't addressed at all, or they get addressed in an incredibly bigoted way that attempts to justify historical (And ongoing!) awfulness to these peoples, or they get addressed in an oblique way that pretends to not be about the native populations at all.
So I'd be honestly surprised if a Bioware employee ever did admit to basing any aspect of DA elves on natives; it would be a *huge* break from the widespread cultural norms regarding this topic.
Though as far as the 'noble elf origin' thing, I can connect that to two different (related) things in North American history: slavery, and how the native populations got treated.
See, in North America, slavery was drawn along highly visible let's-just-call-it-racial lines, and for a lot of people this is then assumed to just be how that works, with any data they find slotted into that framework; a lot of Americans who read about Romans practicing slavery and Romans sneering at foreign barbarians arrive at the assumption that Roman slavery connect these together and basically arrive at the (incorrect) belief that Roman slavery was basically the same as US slavery in terms of it being organized along 'racial' lines. Similarly, US pop culture that depicts slavery tends to assume that you can have the Blue Kingdom of Blue People neighboring the Green Kingdom of Green People and in the Blue Kingdom more or less all Green People are slaves, and no Blue People are slaves. (Meanwhile, in Actual Rome, you had some politicians wanting an Official Slave Uniform, and then other people going 'I don't like that idea, the slaves might realize there's actually quite a lot of them and so revolt', because no, slaves weren't immediately visually distinguishable from non-slaves)
Anyway, all this 'race as the dividing line' stuff in turn carries a bunch of connotations in terms of not being willing to pass out power to the Designated Slave People, stuff that even to this day is still being wrestled with in the US, and the way European colonists and their descendants related (And still relate) to the native populations followed similar lines; you don't give them power. At all. And Dragon Age elves are literally enslaved while also looking to me to be a thin metaphor for North American natives; they fall squarely inside these two boxes.
DeleteAnd to be fair, my general understanding is that throughout history conquerors were usually pretty awful to the people they conquered; my understanding is that a big part of Rome's success was rooted in being less... that. Not that Rome was *nice*, but if you were conquered by Rome, you got to keep much of your existing beliefs, administrative infrastructure, and so on, and when your men were gangpressed and made to go fight Rome's wars, if they had success they would come back with a cut of the loot and this gangpressing was actually an avenue to becoming a Roman Citizen with more or less all the perks. So my impression is that a default expectation that conquerors are going to be horrifically abusive to the peoples they conquered is... pretty accurate to large swathes of human history.
Anyway...
The mage design thing is pretty messy and to be fair it's pretty easy to have it go wrong in the opposite direction -Diablo II had issues at least until Patch 1.10 with the more 'mage' classes having their power tied up in skills that didn't care about equipment, where eg a Necromancer with Bone Spear at Level 20 had almost no ability to further improve their damage output, when that could be reached before Level 40 in a game where the ultimate difficulty expects you to be somewhere above 80. I totally get why several games have fallen back on the 'spells scale to your wand's strength' sort of solution; it lets a game put mages and fighters on relatively even footing by just having them use the same basic model for progressing. I tend to find it unsatisfying, but I understand why it happens.
As for 'anti-pro-mage folks often use jerk arguments', that's... not really a Russia-exclusive thing. I don't see it very often, but only in the sense that I don't see people trying to push back against mage dominance very often in the first place; when I do see people doing so, there's a pretty decent chance it's being handled in a pretty cringe-y way. Which, to be fair, pro-mage arguments can be pretty frustrating stonewalls -for example, you get people who will argue that wizards SHOULD be better than warriors and will just completely ignore all the reasons cleaving to such in a given game is a problem. I imagine anti-pro-mage arguments often end up with the tone they have from sheer frustration at this kind of thing...
Well, western Europeans generally got over Ancient Rome envy through the medieval period.
DeleteThan Renaissance happened. It started in Italy, had generally increased interest in classical age, plus human psychology in general tends to idealise the past... Thus, after hundreds of years Ancient Rome fascination made it's return.
But US thing about Ancient Rome is still really strange to me. And "it's to separate us from UK" is outright '...what?' inducing.
And it's interesting that it can just as weird for a person with inside look.
School portrayal of America colonisation of actually one of those things I wanted to aks but felt like it could be too touchy theme. It look like it is not, so...
Another thing I wanted to ask was about this obsessive (from my perspective atleast) guilt complex (or pretension of it) towards African people in US media (often leading to silly things like African knights of Camelot, African Greek gods etc.) with complete lack of such towards Native people of America. This is really weird for me (and us in general) because atleast subjectively it looks like Natives suffered much more, and yet... Through I guess you already answered this as well.
Through out of curiosity - here we often have this thing where administrative regions have languages of local natives as official along with Russian. Sometimes such languages can even be forcibly taught in schools even if children in question are non-native and live in a a mostly ethically Russian part region, but generally it balanced enough so that in Russian-dominated places most use Russian, in Nenets/Komi/Buryats/etc. places they use according language. Through majority knows Russian atleast at some level, and a lot of local ethical Russains will know some level of local language too.
Do you have the same thing? Like, does a place (state of something) where lives a lot of people from a Native etnicity have their language as official along with English? Can you expect for local non-Natives to help to understand what is written in a Natives' language over there and the like?
Yes, I saw that racial-base slavery thing - and that it's sometimes put into where it really doesn't fit.
DeleteBtw, can it be that sometimes western people like to see racism/etnicity thing where it isn't really here?
There was an atrocity in Rwanda in 90s, usually called "genocide against Tutsi". Pretty much everywhere it's described as, well, a genocide of one etnicity (Tutsi) by another (Hutu). Yet a man (actual Rwandan African) who, according to him atleast, was actually witness of this horror, told that they themselves saw Tutsi and Hutu as social classes i.e. you can become one, for example, and even theoretically switch between them multiple times. There was some ethnicity backstory for this, but it was considered to be a thing of long past. So the slaughter (which he confirmed to be utterly horrible) was seen as forced (and very bloody) removal of a social class, led by another social class. Not unlike various revolutions with executions and lynching of nobility. So portraying it as ethnicity-based purge felt quite weird and "clearly written by foreigners" for said man.
Now, I don't know much about African stuff (I barely knew a guy who works at Russian err... "invited specialists" thing in Uganda, but that's it), and I don't know if this Rwandan man actually told truth, but I think it sounds possible.
And yes, being conquered sucks, and Roman were indeed generally more generous towards their defeated enemies than most.
Through the idea of lenient empire was as old as the idea of an empire itself - last Sumerian tsar Lugalzaggesi (XXIV BC) was relatively kind towards conquered cities and even deed thing for them to be declared their lord by 'them'. In fact, he usually just 'asked' them to join his empire, which he imagined like union of city rulers (with himm of course, being the first among them).
Then he met Sargon, the first tsar of Akkad, who crushed Lugalzaggesi and made his lands parts of Akkad, an empire built on the idea of absolute monarchy and suppressing deafeated nations. And the first empire known to humanity.
I'm sure you are familiar with reputation that Mesopotamian realms keep to this day (Bible helped there too, but it IS generally deserved), but it's interesting to think how would history changed if world's first empire was the one envisioned by Lugalzaggesi, don't you think?
The guilt complex thing is complicated to get into, but from what I can tell it boils down to natives still being seriously dehumanized in a way that black folks aren't. Like, the Deep South -which roughly matches to the Confederate states that were fighting to keep slavery a thing- has a reputation for being really racist, and I'm not gonna say it isn't pretty racist, but the most horrific, casual, open racism I saw was when I was passing through Arizona - and it was racism aimed at natives. And, well, guilt is about going 'I feel bad'; if you feel the bigotry is justified and correct, then you don't feel bad.
DeleteThe slightly more complicated version is that it seems to me that the guilt is cloaked a little more when it comes to natives. Like, you see people joking about how in pop culture anything built on an 'Indian burial ground' is invariably going to be haunted and all, and it's easy to connect this to phrases like 'skeletons in the closet' or 'where they buried the bodies', which are phrases about hidden bad things in a person's history, not to mention such a story is literally having desecration of native culture/grounds come back to bite 'white people'. (Though there's individual cases that come across to me less as 'I feel guilty for what my ancestors did to natives that gave me my current life' and more 'I'm terrified by the thought of modern natives wanting to be compensated for this long history of horrible treatment')
There's also cases where I'm pretty sure the guilt is present but overpowered by what I'm just going to call cowardice. The original release of Age of Empires III, for example, clearly kind of wants to say 'hey, mistreating natives is bad', but stops short of making any kind of real stand, both in a real-world sense and in an in-universe sense; sure, the Black family will fight alongside natives if they happen to be getting screwed over by the story's Bad Guys, and one of them outright marries a native woman, but when one Black family member gets straight-up ordered to go be awful to natives he just briefly goes 'but I don't wanna' and then clearly feels guilty while he goes and does it anyway; he doesn't actually refuse. And in general Age of Empires III shies away from directly engaging with the horrific colonialism; there's moments of alluding to the idea that Other People are terrible to natives, with an undertone that this is bad, but it's off to the side, and it's never presented as more than moderately bad. (Both in the sense of 'we don't hear about literal genocide', and in the sense of 'we just frown disapprovingly at these jerks, but don't try to get them to stop or anything')
And then this all gets cloaked by the taboo quality, where natives get really horribly underrepresented and all. When I was learning history in school, I was under the impression that 'Indians' just kind of... disappeared? I guess? Sometime before the American Civil War, because there were zero references to modern-day reservations to clue me that these peoples were only mostly genocided. (Because that would require admitting to children that their ancestors committed a lot of genocide in the process of making The Greatest Country In The World)
DeleteThough it's worth pointing out that black European knights actually was a thing, and a thing that nobody at the time felt merited particular commentary. (Which is part of why it's easy to miss; nobody felt that it was inherently a Point Of Interest that Sir Dashing had a dark skin tone. We know it must be so more from stuff like medieval art than medieval texts) There's also an obnoxious double-standard thing here that's one of the more insidious examples of racism; that people don't object to White Jesus or White Ancient Romans, even though the former is almost certainly completely wrong and the latter is probably mostly wrong, but if you have Black Jesus or Black Ancient Romans suddenly people start complaining about 'historical accuracy'. (Even though Rome owned a lot of North African territory and absolutely had very dark-skinned people become official Roman Citizens with the purple toga and everything. And also even though the lazy, stupid thing to do would be to assume All Romans were either Italian or more broadly the Mediterranean 'olive' skin tone, neither of which is 'whitebread American'. Or White British person. Or whatever)
And no, there's no official teaching of native languages in US schools, at least not last I heard. In the first place, the native populations are technically sovereign nations with their own laws; the policy isn't to be mixing native students with non-natives and make them all get along. In the second place, the USA education system is a mess in no small part because it has essentially no federal oversight; there actually aren't national-level standards of education. (This makes it particularly wild to me how US education so thoroughly hides this aspect of US history; this isn't a federal propaganda engine dictating to the entire country The Correct Version Of History to be teaching! It's myriad individual places all arriving at the same conclusion on their own!) And in the third place, there's all that racism. Indeed, the main of what I've heard about native culture/language/etc in the modern day is people struggling to keep it all alive at all... my impression is that things are less terrible for natives than they were when I was a kid (Age of Empires III, when it got an HD version, redid stuff to try to be more respectful on this topic; I haven't gotten around to the HD version myself to see if it was successful in this goal, but just the fact that they got real First Nation people involved at ALL is hugely notable), but the emphasis here is on 'terrible', not 'less'.
I think I've heard of this 'reported outside as genocide, viewed inside as a class warfare revolution' bit myself. I've certainly heard of *a* case that follows that exact format.
I'm actually not meaningfully familiar with Mesopotamia at all. I know they're Older Than Rome and all, but school largely glossed over them, and I've long been unclear if that was a lack of interest situation or just because of there being genuinely not much known at the time I was growing up.
So if I understand average non-black person does feel more guilty about slavery and black people than about Natives' fate. Atleast partially because of it's being much more highlighted theme.
DeleteI heard about Smallpox thing.
Oh! I now remember an American TV series my mother likes that I too watched along the way sometimes. "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" (thanks, internet). I don't know how close to actual history it was, but it portrayed Native people sympathetically. US army, on the other way...
And I remember finding it strange how a lot of characters who was flawed but still relatively good people got +100500 to Asshole stat as soon as something was about Natives. They were kinda racist too black people too, but in this case it was more like "blacks are forbidden to do X but are relatively alright otherwise" i.e. they were threated like people but with enfcorced insulting limits, while Natives were sometimes treated as if they are not people at all. And there was an episode about Smallpox too.
So, Natives basically live isolated from general population? Do they themselves prefer this too? Sorry if my questions sound stupid.
About black knights - maybe I should've formulated it better. What I mean is that there are cases where specific chracters/historical people are randomly made black when they weren't in the original/history. Or when there is some kind of small isolated (for long time) society where most people are white and few are black instead of, I dunno, everyone looking slightly brown?
Through to be honest, if I hear "Romans", I automatically think about 'olive' people, and seeing black one among one will reflexingly give me a pause. Force of habit, I guess.
Well, surely you've heard about Babylon.
Mesopotamian realms commonly assotiated with tyranny, warmongering, slavery, oppression and creepy cruel gods. Also with Ziggurats.
This is in many ways true, but they also were one of wheel inventors, they made this 60 sec = 1 min/60 min = 1 hour/year = 365 days scheme that everyone use to this day. They also invented one of the oldest writing systems (Cuneiform).
And like I said, in early history there was actually conflict between 2 ideas of unification - "we all are equal - I am just the first among us" vs "ALL BOW TO ME OR DIE". The latter won. The rest is history.
Hm, now that I'm thinking about it - can it be that western people project them on Byzantium for some reason?
Did you mostly studied just Ancient Greece and Egypt in school?
When I was in school we learned about all of them (Mesopotamia including), but heard barely anything about, say, Ancient China.
I'm afraid my next KB comment (on Distortion magic) will be kinda late. But it will be ready by the end of the week for sure.
That's a reasonably accurate summary, yeah.
DeleteAnd yeah, native populations get... scarily dehumanized. It's especially jarring because we've got stuff like Thanksgiving Day, which is a national holiday basically celebrating the natives being nice to early colonists, helping them get through their first winter, teaching them what's good to eat, how to grow local crops...
I'm not very educated on the exact history of how reservations came to be a thing, and saying they're isolated from the general population is not fully accurate (You may be aware of 'Indian' casinos being a thing. This is one of the examples of the sovereign nation thing, in that US laws about gambling can't be applied on a reservation because it's not actually US soil. And it exists because it's one of the only options people on reservations have for making decent money...), but broadly my understanding is it was something the US government kind of foisted on what few native populations remained. It wasn't a thing the native populations asked for, if that's what you're wondering.
I got the general thrust of your idea. It's why I was bringing up stuff like White Jesus -people are perfectly happy to play fast and loose with this kind of thing when it benefits them and theirs (And to be fair, when it comes to stuff like actors it's often in part just a matter of availability; you cast local talent, so you get local looks), and then when a different population segment does the exact same thing they get up in arms about 'historical accuracy'. I started out being vaguely bothered by stuff like Let's Make Lancelot A Black Dude, but at this point I only care if something is ostensibly trying to be really period-accurate -and in that case I'm going to metaphorically dock points for stuff like 'Camelot looks an awful lot like White Suburban US rather than the British Isles' population circa 1000 AD or whenever this story is insisting King Arthur's stuff occurred in'. If a story is just doing the usual 'it's a story, don't worry about it' sort of thing; sure, whatever, Chinese Lancelot, I don't care.
Ah, Babylon. Yeah. Faction in Age of Empires I, for one. For two I did get taught about them in school, and just didn't have it communicated that Babylon and Mesopotamia are the same/have overlap/whatever the details there are. That would explain a lot of my confusion as a kid. Most of that is familiar as Babylon, yeah. And I better follow the thought experiment, though I don't really find it a compelling question, so...
DeleteI kinda doubt American pop culture is conflating Mesopotamia with Byzantium, personally.
In elementary school I got a broad, vague summary of pre-Egypt, then Egypt got covered a decent amount, then gossiping about Cleopatra's ~saucy~ adventures got focused on to an absolutely insane extent (I was a military brat and moved a lot. I had THREE DIFFERENT SCHOOLS all cover Cleopatra extensively, meaning three different years!) while of course completely failing to mention that Julius was a giant manwhore and everyone knew it, plus Ancient Greece got covered.... juuuust enough to give context on the Roman Empire, basically, and then Rome got covered a ton, and then school fast-forwarded to the 'discovery' of 'the New World' and all that other stuff that leads fairly directly into the modern United States of America.
Even at the time it felt really blatantly like self-centered propaganda (Plus an incredibly creepy focus on Cleopatra's love life: we were PREPUBESCENTS and she'd been dead MORE THAN TWO THOUSAND YEARS. WHY?!?), even if I didn't know the words to describe it that way.
I bailed on public school before I could get to high school so I don't really know what was normal at that point, but three different elementary schools all had broadly the same focus. Especially in terms of what was actually taught as opposed to what was in the books -I regularly read ahead of the class and was dismayed to discover that no, the class wasn't supposed to learn about Erik the Red sailing to North America at all, we were just supposed to gossip about Cleopatra's love life AGAIN.
(I'm bitter about US public school's approach to teaching history, if you hadn't guessed)
And don't worry about the timetable terribly much. I still haven't gotten to some of the older stuff...
I've heard about casinos, yes.
DeleteI know about reservations creation being government idea.
I also heard a lot of bad things about it - like when they were sometimes created on the most barren and worthless land around, and people living there starved as a result. Or how a person would be arrested or outright killed for leaving reservation without special document. Or how reservation land could be decreased in size/taken back if there were resources found on it's territory. Or how there were government-appointed officials who were supposed to defend local Natives right, but in practice often just took money fot the work but did nothing other than occastionaly selling stuff government gave to Natives, and faced no consequences for it, even if pretty much anyone knew. And usual exploitation (sexual including), of course. Or things like "some Native rebels were seen in general region of X reservation. X's people MUST be in cooperation with them! What do you mean "their tribes (i.e. rebels and X reservation) hate each other"? Bullshit, they all conspire against us and will pay for it!" And they did.
But one never know how much is true and how much is propaganda or staff taken out of context. And it was about 19 century. Things change.
What I meant is how does modern Natives feel about this whole system existing to this day and would they prefer to live together with other non-Native people if they could? Through I guess my question is pointless if such level of racism exist to this day.
And I know about Thanksgiving Day. Through here it's usually seen as just "American holiday about eating turkey". Um, does average US person even assotiate this holiday with it's history? There are a lot of holidays in the word that are seen just as reason to relax or celebrate, without thinking about how did they started.
Well, Jesus is European-looking in European portayals, African in African portrayals, and I saw some Japanese icons where both he and his mother were very much Asian. It makes perfect sense to me.
Popculture thing through... I'd guess, atleast here, where I live, it receives more attention for 2 reasons:
1) It's often seen as emphasized (but often insincere) "We are so sorry about X!", yet other faults compared or bigger than X are ignored.
2) It sometimes lead to funny results.
3) How to better put it... There is growing number of people who see it as sort cultural posturing/domination sigh. Kinda like "US are so into representation of black people now! Thus EVERYONE AND EVEYTHING WILL be too, unless they are horribly racist! Because we said so, and our will is law." So people see, say, Zeus being played by a black actor as "Those myths are OURS NOW, bitches! Sincerely, US." It may sound weird, silly or crazy to you, but hey, atleast now you won't be surprised if you ever see a Russian with this way of thinking.
Mesopotamia is both the region and the general name for all the countries that existed there. To be presice, it includes Sumeria, Akkad, Assiria, Babylon and sometimes Urartu. There were also some lesser known countries like Subar(tu) or Mitanni but most people don't care about them. Anyway, they fought each and too over each other, mixed between each other, and shared a lot of culture and inventions between them, so a lot of people see them all as just Mesopotamia.
DeleteBible had Rome-Babylon allusions, and I think Judaism tradition too. And Babylon was seen as either godless or cultist realm by both. Considering that Tevinter (from Dragon Age), Pythium (from Dominions) and New Empire (from Solasta) also share anti-god (Tevinter and NE) or cultist (Tevinter and Pythium) theme... It makes zero sense for Byzantium, but makes pefect sense not-Mesopotamia. Plus I kinda thought that for an average westerner both Bysantium and Mesomotamia are "I dunno, somewhere to the south-east of europe but not as far as India/China?". So maybe they kinda overlapped with Bibleic Rome-Babylon allusions helping. Would also fit with seeng Rome as cool at the same time, like "Western Rome is the cool one", "Eastern Rome is the bad Babylon-like one".
I guess it's just very hard for my brain to accept "Eastern Romans - Third Reich" thing.
About Cleopatra - what. Excuse me but I find it's hard to imagine an education course that pretty much skips Mesopotamia (Guys with wheels! Time measurements!! First empire!!!) Ancient Greece (what about all those philosophers? Wars with Persia? ALEXANDER OF MAKEDONIA? YES, ALL CAPS ARE NESSESARY) yet spends 3 years on Cleopatra, and on her personal life specifically? And than skips all the Middle Ages? It sounds more caricaturish than actual anti-US caricatures I saw.
My school time was after Soviet Union fall apart, if that matters.
I don't remember history course for the school in details, but we had A LOT on Ancient Greece - we had it portrayed as the most important of the ancient countries. Cleopatra was described as the woman that thought with her brother for the Egypt throne, was ally and lover of Caesar and than Mark Antoniy, and than killed herself to evade being prisoner of Octavian. And she was very charming and educated (which she used to manipulate people) but propably not that pretty in modern sense.
We also had stuff about Persia, but I think they were kinda portrayed like villain. Like, not like "they kick puppies for fun" but they were mostly shown as enemies of Greece/Ancient Rome/Second Rome, who were portrayed simpathetically, so...
There was A LOT of stuff about Europe, including Arabs taking over Iberian peninsula, Charlemagne, Crusades, Hundred Years War (Jeanne!), Catholic Church being manipulative and greedy, Vikings, various religious wars... In comparison, other continents got barely anything, sadly.
I also not exactly a fan of the way it we were thought errr... by map parts. Like, THIS region - from X century to Y. Now THAT region - again, from X century to Y. It felt disjointed and led to me (and other people too) sometimes having problem understanding how exaclty events from different places correlated with each other.
And we had alot of stuff about us, of cource. Early Slavic cultures, Rurik-the-Norse-guy, receiving Christianity from Byzantium... All the way to the present.
I'm not strongly read on the history of reservations, but I know that for example reservation lands were set by the US government, often without respect for where a given people actually traditionally lived. I'm not specifically familiar with 'and then starvation happened', but I do know that there was a notable bias toward 'we don't care about this land, so you can have it' -including I heard of a case of a reservation getting moved because a mine was discovered on the land. And like I mentioned the casinos and them being for the money, and part of that was the reservations needing some way to get money to pay for investing into infrastructure such as educational facilities -that the US government basically shoved a bunch of people into metaphorical corners and then left them to take care of themselves, having ripped them from their roots so that was much harder.
DeleteI wouldn't know the general feelings of current native populations, though. I met a few people at one point that gave me some bits of context or meshed in an informative way with stuff I've read about/seen in pop cultural depictions, but it's not something I've ever been involved closely with -I literally didn't know reservations existed until sometime in my mid to late teens. I'd guess from what I do know that integration of that sort isn't widely desired simply because I hear more about stuff like the First Nation terminology, stuff that verbally sets them apart, but... I'm pretty ignorant on this topic overall.
Thanksgiving is actually one of the less 'secularized' holidays in the US. Every school I went to made a point of explaining the backstory behind it every single year (Including why turkeys get so much prominence), it's common (Or was common up to my childhood, at least) to do stuff like have kids put on a play depicting the Original Thanksgiving, etc. The movie Addams Family Values addresses this dissonance fairly directly, with a sequence where a bunch of kids are made to put on a Thanksgiving play, and then the unpopular kids derail from the intended story of 'colonists and natives make nice' to instead go 'natives air their grievances and fight back'. I'm sure there are families who celebrate Thanksgiving without caring about the original context at all, but this isn't like Christmas or Halloween, where people do widely tend to outright forget their origins. (I actually can't remember what's supposed to be Halloween's origin at all; it was always just The Candy Holiday With A Monster Theme to me)
Ah, the cultural projection thing. Yeah, I've cringed at times at seeing Americans get up in arms at other countries ostensibly being slower to embrace diversity and whatnot than the US. It's just... really cringe-y behavior for a lot of reasons.
Ah, so Mesopotamia is a bit like Ancient Greece, in terms of describing a general region with enough cultural overlap (Shared gods and whatnot) and other similarities to be broadly reasonable to lump together, but which nonetheless were distinct political entities that waged war on each other a lot. And then my history books tried much less hard to communicate this than they did with Ancient Greece. That tracks.
I honestly don't know where the average American thinks Mesopotamia is. In school, I never had any sense of where it was relative to everything else. I started out figuring it was in Central America for reasons I no longer recall, but eventually gathered enough info to know that couldn't be it and was just left confused. And I don't think my childhood confusion on this topic was particularly abnormal... so I really don't know what the usual perception is.
To be fair, *probably* each individual school wouldn't have covered Cleopatra so much if I'd stuck them out instead of being moved. US education is, as I noted before, horribly non-standardized; there is no Designated Year To Learn About Egypt In. I read ahead as much as I did in part because different schools had different schedules so I ended up with a certain amount of both being 'ahead' of a given school's intentions and also wildly behind, where Grade X expected you to have read about Thus And Such last year, and that's not what my previous school taught that year so I was out of the loop.
DeleteBut I distinctly recall being incredibly frustrated at how, for example, a textbook would actually cover a fairly long stretch of Ancient Egyptian history, but what was covered by the teacher focused much more heavily on Cleopatra. And even in the textbooks themselves, they played up the idea of Cleopatra The Seducer, and very much downplayed her savviness, not to mention downplayed that she was literally going to DIE if she didn't get some outside allies. (And, again, entirely left out the detail that Julius was not exactly the definition of a faithful man)
Alexander of Macedonia did get covered, but... I personally agree with your outrage. When he was covered in school, it was a fairly brief covering of the fact that he conquered a bunch of land and then died young, and I was broadly taught that he was a big deal, but it wasn't properly contextualized, and a lot of key information was either excluded entirely (eg how his heavy usage of cavalry was utterly unprecedented for the area) or technically mentioned but never really given adequate impact. (He literally conquered THE KNOWN WORLD as far as everyone in the area was concerned)
It sounds like you got more info on the Persians than I did. About the only time any of my schools touched on them was grudgingly admitting they existed when talking about the 300 (Not actually 300, but shhh) Spartans successfully fending off a Persian army much larger than themselves at one point. Sadly, I got more education of Persia from video games than I did from school -and even then, I was always hazy on where Persia was actually located (I vaguely guessed Northern Africa, which is... almost right), and only relatively recently became meaningfully aware that they were one of the more significant nations of their time. And were still around when Ancient Rome was a thing. And in fact never actually went away or had their nation collapse or anything, just inexplicably renamed themselves in the last century.
I literally only learned about Arabic influence on the Spain sort of region from video games; school did not cover this. Charlemagne got mentioned, but to this day I only vaguely know people like him enough that I've never seen pop culture do a villainous or morally questionable rendition of him. The Crusades got mentioned, but essentially nothing of substance got communicated. I first learned of the Hundred Years War from Age of Empires II; none of my schools talked about Jean D'Arc at all.
You're not the first non-American I've seen react this type of way to me talking about my Actual Factual American School Experiences, I should note. And the sad thing is, one of the schools I went to was, at the time, one of the top five schools in the NATION by some metric. The American education system is awful, and my impression is that foreigners routinely hear banally true things about it and incorrectly interpret them as farcical exaggeration, unable to grasp the idea that it might, in fact, be not only genuinely that bad but in fact far worse than that.
... I am sorry you had such experience at school. I liked history lessons (except ones about Soviet time) but yours sound really interest-killing.
DeleteI feel like I should say something else but not sure. I guess I need more time to digest all this, so to speak.
And I understand that stereothype about average American being horrible at geography is generally true as well?
So I guess people who need history for their work learn about in university? Learning it all from almost zero doesn't sound nice.
I can hardly imagine learning about a country without knowing where it is. In my school time history books had A LOT of maps. And they still do, of course.
How did you even learned about a war or battles (like Battle of Thermopylae you've mentioned) without maps? You know, those guys attack from here, those guys were here than moved there etc.
For Alexander of Makedonia, for example, we had maps for every major step of his conquest. Also, famous Macedonian army reformation was the work of his father Philip II aka the guy who essentially took over Ancient Greece before screwing thing up with very unpopular marriage. Alexander had quite a good start because of his father's achievements (which doesn't make him any less great of conqueror, of course). But if Alexander himself was barely mentioned in your schools...
Anyway, for less important cases we had general maps, showing direction of wars conquests and the like.
Here, a schoolbook page about wars of Senusret III, continued by later tsars of Egypt. Or pharaohs, if you want. https://imgs.euroki.org/books/gdzs/4958/1830689.png?v=1547487116
For tests/exams/whatever it's properly called, we had things called contour maps - a blank map with, well, contours. We got a set of assignments, like marking important cities, showing from where to where X's army moved during [war name], showing borders etc.
Here, a solved contour map of Alexander's lands: https://konturmap.ru/history-5-klass-gdz-p14.html
I liked them very much. Even looking at this one bring smile to my face :)
Such maps started to be used at the beginning of 19 century in my country. Did you had nothing like it at all? What did you even do on exams/tests/you-got-the-idea? Listed all lovers of Cleopatra?
Did Ramses II (DA MANLIEST) got attention too? Or Echnaton, Nefertiti and their failed attempt of monotheism?
DeleteWas it mentioned that Caesar was a fan of Alexander and sometimes got sad on "in my age He achieved so much more!.."? And that Cleopatra's dynasty was created by one of Alexander's diadochi?
Btw, where you taught about how those brave Spartans came from the city where most of population were slaves that were periodically culled? Because I got an impression that westerners often have surprisingly positive look on Sparta.
And how were you even taught about Battle of Thermopylae without explainig where did those Persians came from? Did no one in the class thought about raising a hand and asking about it?
For some reason I expected you to have more focus on Crusades than we did. Were you atleast told about Richard, Salah-ad-din and the like? Or about treacherous Fourth Crusade against Byzantium?
Persia didn't renamed themselves - they demanded others to start calling them by their own self-name. In Russia people sometimes still sometimes call them 'Persians' through. The modern country itself is always 'Iran' through. In case you interested, it not the only case when we use unrelated words for a country and it's people.
Did you learned nothing AT ALL about middle ages? Hundred Years War is propably THE medieval war, so completely skipping it is ...wild.
So Americans do not have jokes about Brits and French secretly hating each other to this day? :)
Also, "none of my schools talked about Jean D'Arc at all." - yet they wasted a lot of time on Cleopatra private life. [Sensored]
Alright, you are propably tired of it already.
Yes, reading about your experience feels ...interesting. Mix of "...really?", desire to cringe, desire to tell someone "hey, wanna hear 'something' ", thoughts about late Zadornov and his "Americans are soooo stupid" and some slight suspicion that you just troll me and laugh at me taking it seriously.
I've heard the stereotype that Americans are awful at geography, but don't have a good basis of comparison. It's certainly the case that the US education system does a poor job of providing visual context on geography, though, so I'd buy it's meaningfully true.
DeleteI have in fact heard of real Americans finding themselves overwhelmed by college/university in cases where they need a solid grounding in history for some reason or another. So yeah, I'm pretty sure a lot of people do in fact only really start learning history if/when they exit the actually-mandatory portion of their schooling... if even then. And yeah. It's not nice. In general, it's a trope that Americans who go to college tend to be caught off guard by how much more thought and effort it demands compared to everything up through high school.
The answer for 'how did we learn about battles' was largely 'we didn't'. Age of Empires I providing some basic visual depictions of who is attacking from where in its briefing screens was a revolutionary idea for me -my textbooks included imagery, but it tended to be... flavor? I guess? The sections covering Egyptian history would intermittently have depictions of what the cities of the time might've looked like, and when stuff like gods were discussed they tended to get a traditional depiction included, but my textbooks were, when it came to battles, primarily concerned with dates ("This battle occurred in 253 BC"), who was the leadership on one side (Sometimes both sides, but not often), and occasionally mentioning what in RTS terms would be notable units. (eg Carthaginian war elephants, Egypt using chariots a lot) Tests reflected this type of prioritization as well; when did X happen, who is credited with doing Y, which battle marked the end of some war or another... the actual strategic and tactical decision-making elements were rarely even acknowledged, and certainly weren't part of the tests. (That is, a test wouldn't ask "What direction did So And So launch their attack from?")
Contour maps never came up, and textbooks were horribly unreliable about providing maps (I literally have no idea where George Washington's crossing of the Delaware River is supposed to have occurred; this is straight-up US history that would be trivial to pin down on a standard map of the continental US, but when I was taught about this event no map was provided), and when the maps bothered to show up they were terrible about often being overly 'zoomed-in', with no attempt to place a location on a globe or similar. I spent well over a decade unsure where myriad countries I'd technically been educated on WERE because there was either no map or the map failed to contextualize the location -it took depressingly long for me to actually parse that Alexander was in Greece, as an example we're talking about right now.
Ramses the II got covered some in school, though I honestly couldn't tell you anything about him aside that Ramses is the usual Pop Culture Pharaoh Name. I've not heard of Echnaton ever, and looking it up the alternate way it can get spelled is still a name I've never heard before. Nefertiti I've heard, but I think only from pop culture, not when I was being taught history in school.
Caesar's opinions and statements were not a part of the curriculum. In general, school focused on events in a manner largely divorced from motivation, reasoning, and all that other human stuff that gives actual context to events. American historical figures got to actually have things they said quoted some, but... only some. Cleopatra actually being of partially Roman descent went entirely unmentioned -I learned it later, outside school, but in spite of three years of gossiping about Cleopatra's love life, school carefully contrived to make it sound like Julius showing up was the first meaningful contact between Rome and Egypt; this kind of thing happened a lot, where no lies were actually told but it sure looks to me like the curriculum was actively trying to mislead readers. (The bit that really sticks with me is that school made a point of emphasizing that Greek city-states were democracies -and then never bothering to elucidate the details of that system. I doubt I was the only kid going "So like America?", and I strongly suspect that was in fact the point of this not-technically-lying presentation. Not even getting into the part where the US is actually a representative republic rather than a democracy...)
DeleteI only earlier this year came across a blog (Written by an actual professor who teaches history for a living) that laid out the entire horrific setup of how ancient Sparta worked. Public school touched on the idea that Sparta and Athenes didn't like each other, and some bits like Ares and Athena being their respective preferred gods got talked about, but largely contrived to make all the Greek city-states sound alike, with Sparta and Athenes just being the biggest and most powerful ones. Sparta in particular only got covered in the form of talking up the Battle of Thermopylae, which itself was presented in full Spartan Propaganda mode: claiming it was literally 300 soldiers vs the (whatever large number my textbook went with) Persians and entirely leaving out that actually the Spartans had more than double their number in slave-soldier auxiliaries.
Of course, that touches pretty neatly on one of the weirdest-in-retrospect elements of my schooling: that school largely only acknowledged slavery when discussing ancient Egypt and when discussing US slavery. (Occasionally bits would slip through; I don't remember their name, but a Greek philosopher got mentioned as having started out as a slave, even though my textbooks otherwise contrived to avoid mentioning that your average Greek city-state had around a third of the population in slavery) I never quite believed the implied story of "Societies have only practiced slavery twice in human history and obviously will NEVER do so again", but it took over a decade for me to really understand that actually slavery is REALLY common throughout human history no matter what part of the world you look at.
Richard the Lionhearted and Saladin got mentioned, but... the Crusades got glossed over a lot. I probably learned more about Saladin from playing his campaign in Age of Empires I than I did from school. The Crusades have a lot of, like, pop culture presence, with all the stereotypes of knights or paladins that go questing and whatnot, but in terms of what I learned from school, I just got some Names That Matter, and a few dates of events I was supposed to memorize without any context. At this point I know the basic sketch of the Crusades, but honestly, not much more than 'church pressured people into trying to retake the holy land in part via the threat of excommunication'.
DeleteWhat I learned about the middle ages was... barely existent. Agincourt is the main thing I remember having to learn about. My history classes really did basically skip from the Roman Empire pretty directly to the events that lead to the colonies and ultimately the USA. The British/French tension thing is plenty well-known, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly a cultural osmosis thing -I can remember being confused as a kid by stuff like French and British officers in specific sniping at each other in eg World War II movies, because I didn't have the info to know that yes there's an ugly story there that's the kind of thing that can echo decades or centuries past the original events.
tbh this is mostly pretty cathartic for me. I hated how history was taught every step of the way (I hated all the emphasis on memorizing dates with no attempt to provide context and meaning), I've always hated how American pop culture tends to treat it like history itself is intrinsically boring rather than history being taught in a bizarrely atrocious way, but it's not really a topic I've ever been in a position to express all that honestly.
I forgot to metion in the previous comment - I saw both Addams Family movies and quite liked them (but it was rather long ago). I vaguely remember the derailed play scene (was it Wednesday who did it?). I didn't put much thought in it back there through.
Delete... How does one even make ANYTHING about geography wothout proving visual context? Look, if you will say that you also had algebra without numbers, I won't buy it.
Why does no one do something with such 'education'? Does people in general believe it's perfectly normal? Or something like "this knowledge is useless for most people anyway?" Do they think other countries do about the same?
Surely people like migrants from Europe should be shocked by this?
And again, does nobody in class ever asked about where those mentioned countries are?
About battles - wasn't there, like, not even something akin to (not this specific examples) "Napoleon coudn't take Mantua for some time, so when it (Mantua) got reinforcements, he allowed them to enter the city - because it lead only to massively increased number of people who need to eat and thus to starving"? Or "In Battle at Molodi Crymean Tatars' army was about twice the size of army of princes Vorotinsky and Khvorostin, but Tatar tactics were based of mobility + they had no siege weapon, so Russian army used gulyay-gorod tactics so that they could pretty much shoot at Tatars with inpunity, while ignoring any mobility factor and forcing them to either retreat or charge in melee." Tatars chose the latter btw. It was not a good idea.
About your own history atleast? I dunno, something about your commanders' desicions during your War of Independance?
Echnaton was the guy who kinda invented monotheism (Atonism). He started with with giving priorinty to THE god named Aton and later tried to make make him the only god. By force. His wife Nefertiti was his supporter and assistant. Priesthood, of course, didn't like it, and after Echnaton's death (reasons unknown) everything was brought back as it was before. Echnaton's name was partially purged, temples of his god destroyed, his new capital abandoned... You got the idea.
There is a theory that Atonism greatly influenced Judaism (and there are some objective hymn similarities), which led to Christianity, so in a way his legacy still lives.
He gave a lot of power to Nefertiti, to the point that, according to some sources, he eventually proclaimed her to be his official co-ruler.
He was also known for some weird for a tsar of Ancient Egypt behavior. He barely thought about things outside of his country (which led to worsening of diplomatic relationship with a lot of countries), and instead of portrayals of him smiting his enemies he had stuff like pictures of him and his wife playing with their children - which may sound cute for modern people but was really facepalm-worthy for people of the time.
He was an interesting person if you think about it - on one, side he pretty much tried to concentrate all the power in his own hands, on another - he repeatedly evaded expected 'alpha male' behavior and in addition seemingly tried to look more human than most of divine pharaohs. Alas, he was liked by no one in the end.
Ptolemy dinasty was ethnically Greek (Makedonian), and they kept it being mostly "pure-blooded" by practicing incest. And there was a legend/propaganda that the first Ptolemy was an illegitimate son of Phillip II and thus a half-brother of Alexander. Cleopatra was from this dynasty, Julius Caesar was a fan of Alexander... You got the idea.
So, like "X conqured Y in year [...]". For some reason. Or because he could. Awesome.
Maybe the intention was to present pure facts and results, so that they could be judged without possible sympathy/antipathy towards specific people? Though Cleopatra thing really doesn't fit in this case.
About counting 'people' and ignoring slaves - this reminds me about my experience with a western guy (don't know his country for sure) and discussion of a battle between Novgorod (who won) and Sweden (who lost). Sweden had numerical advantage here but the guy tried to prove the opposite by counting everyone on the Novgorod side but only knights/nobles on Sweden. Such things make me wonder - should I feel insulted by another attempt of "Russian hordes vs few Europeans" idiocy or flattered that Russian common folk count as people while European don't? :)
DeleteThan again, I saw some thankfully rare westerners who actually thought that European historical armies were literally composed from knights (=professional warriors) alone. You know, as opposed to someone "using militia(=innocent civilians) as cannon fodder".
This people really need to play more strategy video games, if school and logic failed them.
On slavery - well, this certainly explains occasional "nobody but THE EVIL OPPRESSIVE EMPIRE ever uses slavery" thing in fantasy.
I wonder what would be your childhood reaction if you would be informed that Ancient Greeks believed that democracy is impossible without slavery, as it it reign of free people, and person who is forced to work for living is not truly free? :) Or that Athenes' police was composed of slaves, because police need to use force at times, and being beaten by another person is an insult, while being beaten by a living tool of government isn't?
Dates without context sounds horrible to me personally - while I'm reasonably good with calcultaions, remembering specific numbers combinations always gave me troubles. Retelling a book? Sure! Memoryzing poetry? Why not. Someone's phone number? Errr... History dates without context that gives associations sounds like a nightmare.
"Church pressured"? As far as I know, the idea was met with a lot of enthusiasm. Trophies! Glory! Places from Bible! And we can get some free indulgentions too! Plus ruling powers saw it as opportunity to put all those ambitious knights and nobles somewhere.
The ironic thing about Crusades is that the starting idea was to help Eastern Romans against Seljuk Turks. In case you don't know, Arabs (contrary to modern stereotypes of radical islamists) were pretty tolerant people (they freely allowed Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem, for example) and even their wars against Eastern Romans were civilised for that time. Seljuks, on the other hand, were about RAPE!PILLAGE!!BURN!!! combined with hatred towards other religions (but not only). They waged wars against both Arabs and Eastern Roman and were seen as psychos by both. And than they took Jerusalem. Try to guess how fun it was for Christian people inside.
So the idea of Crusades was perfectly reasonable. Kick out the barbaric bastards, improve relations between Catholics and Ortodox Chrisians by making the former help the latter, get something along the way... And the First Crusade indeed dealt great damage to Seljuks. While already getting of the course at times.
Ultimately, "beat Seljuks" became "beat all Muslims" (with many atrocities along the way). "Free Holy Land" became "TAKE Holy Land". As for helping Eastern Romans - Fourth Crusade was launched AGAINST them. With friends like this...
Oh, I'm glad (and kinda relieved) that you like this discussion. Through it got way longer than I anticipated.
P.S. I actually replayed Assassion's Creed: Revelation, got full of RAGE, and almost posted a long comment about it, but thankfully supressed that impulse. :)
It was Wednesday, yeah. Addams Family Values actually has a lot of fairly biting social commentary of that sort in it -not the first movie, interestingly.
DeleteOh boy, do you really want to hear about the failure of the US education system to teach me math? Because it's a lot more horrible of a story than the history stuff. And absolutely none of it can be blamed on me moving around a lot or anything, this was pure, 100% 'how is an entire nation THIS BAD at teaching such an elementary set of concepts?'
Yeah, the school practices were just viewed as normal. I'm only half-familiar with all the cultural forces involved, but broadly the US education system has no real governmental oversight, it's perpetually underfunded, parents are largely not particularly aware of the details of what's being taught and whatnot, and all this and other stuff means there's not really pressure in most places to try to improve things, or there's pressure but it's coming from the wrong directions where it can't actually fix anything because parents being mad at the schools isn't going to secure them funding to fix problems. Immigrants to America tend to be people whose situation back home was awful and they came to America hoping for new opportunities -so even when stuff is bad, their attitude can often be black-comedically summarized as 'they beat me half as often, my life is so much better here!' So... that's not a direction for outrage over education to come from, and in fact the usual pressure from immigrant parents is to push their kids to perform well so they can have better opportunities than their parents.
And kids asking questions wasn't helpful. At one point I didn't understand an explanation in the textbook, and went to my teacher and asked for clarification. They verbatim quoted the exact passage I'd just explicitly told them I didn't understand. This was a particularly *breathtaking* example, but it's pretty representative of what I experienced; teachers were often ill-equipped to cope with problems like 'the students don't understand the textbook on their own', and even in cases where they probably could manage such the entire cultural framework of how a teacher operates didn't really include the relevant behaviors.
Military stuff got framed basically purely in terms of dates and outcomes. X won so-and-so battle in Y year. Sometimes military tactics stuff came up, like there being talk of British Redcoats doing badly against the colonial forces because the British forces stood up straight in formation and so were easy targets while the colonial forces didn't, but not often, and it was... slanted. Less "here's some analysis of the likely failure points for the losing side, going by the information we have" and more "possibly a true statement, but really we're saying it because it sure does make for good propaganda about America having always been scrappy and all". And no, I have literally zero knowledge of what colonial commanders did when rebelling against Britain back in the day; this was not something that was taught. I mostly got to read about stuff like the 'Boston Teap Party', ie colonists throwing a bunch of tea in the ocean as some weird symbolic gesture of anger. You might have noticed this site's tagline about video games/video and games being our only education: that's not just me trying to make a cool-sounding sentence or something, it's *literally* the case that I learned far more about history, math, etc, from playing video games than I did in school.
(I should emphasize that I didn't ever experience high school; part of the problem is that the early years have generalist teachers who have to individually teach the entire curriculum to a class of potentially 30-ish students. By contrast, high school has specialist teachers, where you get a teacher whose entire job is teaching History classes. So it's possible high school is less atrocious and I just never experienced it. I... doubt this is really so for a variety of reasons, but it's possible if you talked to an American who went to high school that they'd relate a better school experience)
DeleteMan, Echnaton sounds way more interesting than gossiping about Cleopatra's two thousand years-gone love life for the third time...
Oh wow, I've never heard the tidbit about Julius possibly hooking up with Cleopatra because of Alexander The Great being in her family tree. That fits so much better with what I do know of him than anything I've heard before.
America as a whole has a fixation on trying to be 'fair and balanced' and 'unbiased'. (If you've ever watched a US news network, you've probably heard these phrases, as a really in-your-face example) It's a sufficiently strong fixation you can get situations where two plans get proposed, one is REALLY OBVIOUSLY much worse of a plan, but then people insist on trying to contrast them as equally valid plans and scrape up nice things to say about the bad plan. It's a habit I had to actively work to curb in myself, it's so insidiously universal. I've long suspected school's approach to history was this at work, myself, and the ways it fails to fit? Not really a problem with the theory; the desire to (appear to) be unbiased doesn't stop people from having really blatant biases. It just means that if you call them out on their bias, they refuse to admit the bias exists -very possibly to the point of believing their own lie.
It's... pretty normal in the US to think medieval armies were just knights. My impression is that video games are ablating this misconception, but when I was growing up it was everywhere. I'm not entirely sure HOW -Agincourt is standard to teach and the British bowmen being important was not presented as 'bow knights' or something- but for a good chunk of my life it wasn't 'thankfully rare'. Not helped by school avoiding talking about battles in any real detail -there's a lot less opportunity to be disabused of such a notion when textbooks rarely bother to talk about army composition at all.
I'd not heard of Athenian slave-police before, but I actually did learn of the "democracy is impossible without slavery" bit in my mid-teens. It was... jarring. Up to that point everything I'd heard made Ancient Greece seem pretty civilized and nice and sophisticated. This tidbit was the start of this illusion breaking, and at this point I'm pretty horrified my textbooks basically tried to present Ancient Greece as a model to aspire toward.
But yes, US fantasy loves its 'slavery is only practiced by Some Bad Guy Nations' setup. Even fairly 'gritty' fantasy often does this!
History as a series of names and dates to memorize was indeed awful. I never understood what it was supposed to accomplish...
I'm not terribly surprised to hear my understanding of the Crusades is not terribly accurate. School barely touched on it, pop culture isn't much better, and it's not a segment of history I've ever been strongly interested in. (Or otherwise had it come up; I know a lot more about the Roman Empire than I'd ever have sought out myself because my dad is a huge Rome nerd and always has been)
About math - I kinda want to ask and kinda don't. It starts to became somewhat surreal.
DeleteThan again, if it will prove to be too brain-damaging, I can always torment you with another "My Poor Byzantium" comment... So, if you want - go on.
Btw asking you about "Revelations" portrayal was kinda wrong, as Ubisoft is a French company, and this series in particular is mostly made by their Canadian studio. And to my relief, I found a good number of English discussions on WTF-and/or-RAGE-inducing portrayals in this game. Even if ignoring the whole "turning a town into a giant gas chamber" thing. I even saw jokes about making a game where we should play as an American colonist and gleefully genocide Natives as symbol of protection of downtrodden and fighting against tyranny.
Through there is a thing I want to ask. It comes way to close to politics, but... So, if it's all as horrible as you describe, how does the whole thing keeps afloat? I mean, you are a person from the country that is №1 at [write a lot of stuff] according to 100500 of various international organisations. And from the county that REALLY likes to remind everyone about it. And the one that like to present itself as authority at everything. Yet you describe your education system as something that pretty much designed to make children grow into idiots, trained only to remember semi-random facts and numbers, don't aks any question (as answers are worthless) and, atleast in case of history, that learning is "intrinsically boring". Don't you see some contradictions here?
Also, if even your own history is taught in such minimalistic way, where does all this showy American patriotism come from? I'm pretty sure that at the very least all-the-Europe has the stereotype of demonstatively patriotic Americans.
"America as a whole has a fixation on trying to be 'fair and balanced' and 'unbiased'. " - don't take that personally but absolute majority of Russian population (regardless of political views or sympathy/antipathy towards your county) will see it as very bad attempt at joking.
About armies of knights - how are battles imagined than? Just 2 big groups of heavy cavalry screaming "WAAAAAGH!!!" and charging each other? What about sieges? Does people imagine knights personally finding wood and working on siege towers/rams/siege weapons? And personally digging under the walls to plant explosives? What about ranged weapon in general? Does people imagine knights shooting from the horseback? Operating trebuches/cannons? Do they imagine infantry somehow stop existing in middle ages and than returned when enough countries started to use guns? Does people imagine there be SO MANY knights that they could form whole armies, capable of taking over large cities/countries? Is it thought about Europe specifically or about world in general (like Japanese army is made of samurai alone)?
Well, as far as I see word "crusader" itself is usually posivitvely colored in western(=mostly American) video games. It's often used in similar case as "paladin". Or for people fighting evil and the like. In Russia it's mosly seen in fantasy context (usually positevely too) this days, but historically they were seen pretty negatively. For very religious people - as one of the ungliest spots in the history of Christianity (fourth crusade in particuar). And some people believe them being one of reasons that led to creation of radical Islam branches.
Was there something, anything, that was taught at respectable level in your schools in your opinion?
Well, I should start by noting that I'm genuinely pretty bad at math on an innate level; I probably have a mild form of dyscalculia or something, but whatever the case I struggle to keep more than two numbers in my head at a time and my intuition of how to math things out is often wrong even when strictly speaking I know better. The difficulties I have aren't purely bad education -by contrast, my brother has always grasped math just fine even with identically bad explanations.
DeleteBut even so, this is a pretty atrocious story.
So the thing is, I spent the first several years of my schooling with zero idea that math had anything to do with actual reality. I knew that if I was faced with a problem of "2+2= " that I was supposed to write down 4, but I had no concept that this was as in "I have two apples, I grab two more apples, that's a total of four apples". As best as I was able to parse things, math was some weird arbitrary arcane game adults expected me to master, only much less fun than trying to learn an equally arbitrary video game's rules.
Now, you'd think this would've been discovered and resolved in short order, but as I've already said the problem persisted for literally years; my grades in math were substandard, but not bad enough to be failing grades or anything. I was solidly a B student overall, except in science where I basically always got As, and math, where I largely got Cs and the occasional B. So my grades hinted at math being a weakness, but only a mild one, not a fundamental lack of comprehension. Which touches on one of the problems with the school system; memorizing expected answers is all you need to get decent grades, but memorizing the text you'll regurgitate doesn't mean you have any understanding of what you've supposedly been taught. I was forced to memorize a bunch of addition and subtraction problems in my earliest grades, and the kindergarten I went to happened to force its students to memorize the times tables out to 12*12=144, and then the overwhelming majority of test questions fell inside the range of answers I'd already been forced to memorize, so I generally got half or more of the problems answered correctly even though I had NO IDEA what any of this nonsense meant.
This all finally came to a head when division started being taught and for whatever reason it didn't follow this format, where I couldn't just memorize the expected answers because I wasn't given many answers and the test problems were largely straying quite far from what problems I'd been told the answers to. I began regularly turning in sheets that had no correct answers, or only a couple.
Now, the feel-good story version of events would be that a teacher would find this enough of a red flag to actually interrogate me and ultimately discover that I knew essentially nothing about math.
In actual reality, this anomalous behavior was responded to with "I know you're a bright kid, why aren't you trying on this one subject?"
The actual solution was that I stopped doing my math work at school, 'forgetting' to turn them in at the end of the day, and taking them home to be done as 'homework' with my very confused mom. ("Wow, I've heard they give kids more homework nowadays, but jeez, this is so much...") Fortuitously, my mother is actually extremely good at math; she tutored other teens when she was a teen, when she took college classes she took brief tests to basically skip the need to 'learn math' by proving she already knew all of that stuff, etc. So this plan ended up actually working out with her finally explaining to me stuff in a way that was at all meaningful; I still vividly remember her getting the basic concept of division across to me by dividing a pie into sections, thus explaining why the numbers go up when we're describing increasingly smaller amounts. (Which was another reason division in particular was a huge hurdle for me)
But school? It would be a lie to claim it taught me any math, ever.
DeleteAs a bonus bit of infuriatingness, in the US algebra is considered to be an Advanced Math Skill, Too Hard To Be Teaching Children. (Or at least it was when I was a kid; I've heard rumblings about people wanting to teach algebra sooner nowadays, but I don't know how that's going) I initially thought this was a reasonable thing, because all this stuff with suddenly using letters alongside your numbers was incomprehensible to me, but t some point I had a lightbulb moment about what algebra actually is and RAGED; in the first place, any math problem is algebra ("You have some numbers and equation symbols. What's the unknown number?"), just once schools are *calling* it algebra they represent The Mystery Number with X or whatever instead of with a blank space or a question mark. In the second place, algebra as a kind of deductive reasoning problem was something I'd been doing in video games for years: "I do ten damage a hit, this thing dies on the tenth hit. Ergo, it must have more than 90 HP, but less than 101." Including that I would tweak my numbers to try to arrive at the exact number. ("Well, how many hits does it take with 7 damage? Oh? 13 hits? Huh, exactly 91 HP then.")
I used to hate math. At this point I hate whoever all made the decisions that lead to it being taught so amazingly badly in schools.
Anyway...
I should note that Canadian pop culture and American pop culture have a lot of overlap when it comes to... a lot of things, but especially stuff like how natives get depicted. So Revelations being made by a Canadian studio isn't really that different in substance from if it was an American studio. But yeah, I've never gotten into Assassin's Creed as a series because I keep hearing about this kind of thing in regards to it...
I honestly couldn't tell you where all the hardcore patriotism comes from. I've never been one, in spite of being a military brat where both parents were themselves military brats; it's not a mentality I relate to. Immigrants can be some of the most hardcore patriots, and I get their stories -they came to America because they expected it to be an improvement for them and/or their kids, and then it was so they're all aboard the patriotism train. But for the people who have enough generations between them and their ancestors coming to North America that they don't identify as anything other than 'American'... I don't get it. It's in the pop culture, some of the propaganda vibe is there in school, and then I guess a lot of people are ignorant about the rest of the world (In part due to the horrible education system) so they aren't aware of a lot of the contradictions. And they don't look for them, and/or rationalize away any they run into on their own.
And from what I've read, part of the problem is that 'the greatest country in the world' used to be... let's say 'reasonable to believe'... but it's been eroding since sometime before I was born. There's assorted metrics for quality of life standards and whatnot that America did use to top in, and nowadays is actually far down in. And then pop culture has a 'lag time' because it's made primarily by older people; a Hollywood film written and directed by people in their 50s, where the film comes out in the year 2000, is liable to primarily reflect the experiences of people who were born in 1940-something, not of the kids who might watch that move in the year 2000. In my mid-teens, I actually largely shifted to reading fanfiction and consuming webcomics over traditional media, and in retrospect I'm certain this is in part because all that was made by people in my 'generation' who thus had a view of the world more in line with what I experienced; this includes that all the Greatest Country In The World stuff was a rarity to see from people closer to my age.
First, you said that education has no govermental supervision, but surely teachers get tested for ...how to call it... professional suitability from time to time?
DeleteSecond, I still don't understand how did NOBODY did anything if it was so bad. My brother's class, for example, had problems with A LOT of kids having bad biology grades. Kids themselves generally didn't like the way they were taught (pretty much "memoryze text from the book" and that's it). So at the parental comitee* meeting people collectively shown their dissatisfaction to a senior-ranking person (I don't know who to call it properly), and the teacher actually started to work much better, using various um... Google Translate suggests 'training aids'. Like, an actual model of human heart, or skeleton, or actual living flowers if it was about them. Kids started to like her much more btw, so she harbored no hard feeling or anything. Grades bacame better too, so in the end everyone were satisfied.
Now, not all attemts to change things in schools end with success (obviously), but if no one will even try, they won't for sure. And your country prides itself on democracy, civil society etc., yet somehow NOBODY ever tried to do anything?
*I don't know how to properly call it in English, but it's that thing when parents of kids from a class periodically meet, discuss things, organize activities, buy something for the class etc. And where some women (always women for some reason) occasionally try to find out who is the alpha bitch here. 'sigh' Do not try to tell me that you don't have them - I saw them (or some thing akin to) in movies.
Alright, now to the comment.
If I remember correctly, for us understanding what does the numbers mean was the very first thing we were taught about them. I skipped kindergarten (in Russian it's seen more like "just place to put your kids for some time"), but still learned, for example, addiction and substraction before going to school by asking mom about it. She explained me using clock as example :)
In school I made calcultion in mind quite better that most so others often asked me if they needed to calculate something. I felt so smart because of it :)
Side note 1 - it's propably sounds funny to you but it took way more time than it should have to understand how does your letter grades thing work. I still remember seeing cartoons and thinking "what does those letters even mean? Are they abbreviation?" I only understood that from video games that used letters as ranks. :)
Side note 2, just to make sure - "science" lessons are physics and chemistry combined, right? We had them as separate things.
Side note 3 - does English has a single word for "memorize without understanding"? Russian does, but Google Translate doesn't help again. Through the Russian word is usually assotiated with people who doesn't truly commit to learning or fail to understand, not with something people 'forced' to do.
Wait a second. Did I misunderstand or you were forced to memorize multiplication tables without being getting explained how it even works? If yes - it's positively retarded.
I get it you never had after-lessons for kids who needed help with understanding material?
You should have asked your mom way earlier.
The great arcane knowledge of finding X and Y. Suuuure.
About Assassin's Creed: Revelations - in short, while the game itself is pretty good, it's Byzantine/Ottoman coflict portrayal is horrible. First, unusually for the series that always insist that any war has good and bad people on both sides, Byzantines are portrayed as irredeemably bad guys who doesn't deserve any sympathy without ANY explanation, other than "they are allied with enemy organisation because nobody else aggreed to help them" and literally have ZERO good guys. They get no simpathy from anyone and the game clearly expects the player to share this view.
DeleteOttomans portrayed as good guys without explanation as well, with exactly ONE bad guy among them - and he is a traitor who wants to become sultan. And again, the game clearly expects the player to share this opinion by default. Well, occasionally game tries something like "they are more sophisticated and multicultural and overall superior civilization" - which is all factually wrong. What brings it all to insane level is that there are a few mentions of Ottomans oppressing/killing/enslaving ethnic minorities with people form them wanting vengeance - and THOSE PEOPLE are one who portrayed as villains. There is also a weird character that is a girl born in harem, who was supposed to become a concubine and "should not think about anything but sultan's joy", escaped... and became a spy who infiltrates rebels and helps Turk government to crush/enslave them. She is one of good guys.
At the beginning of the game Byzantine soldiers used an opportunity (Sultan and one of his sons are at war with each other) to retake a lot of Konstantonople. Player under the banner of fighting against oppression and tyranny crush them district by district, until the whole city is controlled by Ottoman occupants. The culmination of this insanity is the mission when we find there is actually a surviving Byzantine undeground town in Kappadokia (google it, it's pretty cool in real life). With peaceful civilians, most laidback guards in the game, shops, rare books that you can't find anywhere else in the game... Than you make an explosion that fill the whole cave with gas that slowly and painfully kills everyone in the town except something like a few dozen of people (most of them are soldiers you kill later). You also personally kill their leader, who tries to tell about saving his people and gets "your country is dead, as are you". And the character is portrayed as morally superior. And no, not even as "it's horrible but I have no other choece" bullshit or anything. It's just a grand victory over the bad guys. In other words, GOOD GUYS WHO CLAIM TO PROTECT DOWNTHRODDEN AND NEVER HARM INNOCENTS GENOCIDE PEOPLE WHO FIGHT AGAINST THE OCCUPANTS BY TURNING THEIR LAST FREE SETTLEMENT INTO A GAS CHAMBER. AND IT'S PORTRAYED AS GOOD THING. WHAT.THE.FUCK.
It goes even more insane if you remember that Turks, among other things, actually attempted genocide of Armenians (who are Ortodox Christians and had very good position in Eastern Roman Empire in the past, including at least one ruling dynasty being ethnically Armenian) in real life at the beginning of XX century. Along with Ortodox Greeks, who had a lot of Byzantine descendants among them. With defiling their architectural treasures along the way. Main ideologist behind it was killed by Soviet army in 1922. According to some sources - specifically by a certain Armenian man who sought him for some time.
DeleteAnd this game (XVI century) actually mentions real things like Turks making baracks out of Byzantine Ortodox сhurch. Or tranforming a plaza of churches and public bathes into place for slave auctions. WHILE PRESENTING IT ALL AS UNDERSTANDABLE THINGS AND PORTRAYING THOSE WHO TRY TO FIGHT AGAINST AS BASTARDS WHO DESERVE TO DIE TO THE LAST ONE.
And, you know, the whole thing of repeatedly killing red-clothed Ortodox soldiers with double-eagle heraldry and then genociding their civilians using gas chamber for the sake of megalomanic bastards claiming to be a superior civilisation gives me completely irrational desire to inflict various acts of violence on the people who made this game. Must be my barbaric Russian nature.
Oh, and Russian version (which I played) softened atleast some of the dialogues. As I learned from youtube, in the original Byzantines treated even worse in dialogues. And the Byzantine leader is called monster.
This game also uses some Byzantine unit (in RTS meaning) names wrongly, but at this point it doesn't even matter.
Also, there is a single mission where the hero really need a free naval way out and is forced to use a Byzantine syphonofore* to burn multiple Turk ships blocking the port. I replayed it like, 5 times? It was the beautiful thing in the game.
*I'm not sure how to properly call it in English. It's basically big flamer-like naval cannon that used incendiary thing called 'greek fire'.
Like I said earlier, I felt better after finding out there there are a lot of western people who found all this to be horrible on many levels. And that even base premise of making Byzantines bad guys and Ottomans good guys is widely enough seen as WTF-inducing; there were a few people outright calling Ottoman Empire "monstrous" or "one of the darkest parts of human history", so the very premise of the game sounds insane to them. There was an amusing moment with a guy thinking that devs did it to not anger Muslim players - he got an answer from an actual Muslim guy who 'colorfully' expressed his opinion on Ottoman Empire and ensured that no, most of Muslim players would not get angered if Ottomans were portrayed as bastards and that he personally specifically attacked their soldiers just because he could and believes he slaughtered more of them than Byzantines. I guess he was an Arab :)
Of course, there were also people speaking that "player take games too seriously" and the like...
Things like that is the reason I don't play historical video games anymore. 'sigh'
...I needed to tell someone about it. Thanks for liste... reading/scrolling over. Now to more amusing things.
How does one even make a story about battles/combat while skipping sieges? Taking/protecting cities is the main purpose of the whole process, you know.
DeleteI have a feeling that if I post somewhere even half of what you describe, I will be called out for one the most retarded attempt of negative propaganda ever.
We wrote A LOT of essays about various literature things. There are actually a lot of jokes about literature teachers finding way more hidden meanings and themes and stuff in classics than authors ever intended. And we were supposed to use ONLY cursive.
I also heard that it's look (Russian cursive) makes westerners cry - my current version will propably give them mental trauma.
I always found political stuff really boring so I don't remeber a lot about it.
Did you have astronomy? In my time it was temporally removed from the list. It returned back since than.
We also had computer science, but it was pretty bad. Not surprisingly, considering the time. Through my brother is still very proud of the simple calculator program he made back there :) And hey, eventually I made a good number of fixes for video games I own, almost had some integrated by GOG (rights holder said no but I still got to chose a free game but never used it because of the horrible interface), and now, even somewhat rusty, help you with King's Bounty code, so maybe it was not as useless as I remember.
Oh, and RUSSIAN HACKERS!!! TREMBLE!!!!!
There was also a err... "safer life" thing that was barely actually present in my time but is now teach kids about first aid, what to do during stuff like fires, quakes and the like, how to defend against internet frauds, blackmailing, bullying etc.
There were also music and painting lessons, but nobody took them seriously for obvious reason. I, personally, was horrible at both, but got good grades anyway, because making children suffer due to lack of specific talents would be idiotic.
And we had sports. It's usual teacher was a bitch with some openly misandric views (especially against nerdy boys) and leniency towards girls. By far my least favoured thing in the school.
So as you can see we had a lot of problems too. Through nothing of size you describe. Um, have a virtual manly hug?
Apparently atleast some schools also have ecology now, but I don't know anything about it.
Well... lemme give a story to try to provide some context.
DeleteI've mentioning bailing on school entirely. What specifically happened is that I got middle school, and I couldn't cope; I often missed classes entirely because I couldn't find them, I couldn't keep track of the different-every-day-of-the-week class schedule, and when I was making it to class at all I couldn't follow things well. My parents responded by setting up a parent/teacher meeting to try to figure out a solution...
... and it was obvious from second one that the school staff had zero interest in doing anything to help. They just insinuated I was stupid, and their final conclusion was 'if he's still having this much trouble six months from now, we'll revisit the possibility of accommodations'. When a school year was nine months, and the meeting occurred more than a month in; so basically they MIGHT'VE helped me get through the last 15% of the year. (Y'know, assuming Meeting Two wasn't equally committed to refusing to help)
This lead to my parents pulling me out of the regular school system entirely.
Now, this was probably the worst school I went to (Another school seemed similarly awful, but I spent less than three months in it), but the basic attitude was pretty normal. At a different, nicer school, a teacher wanted me put on Ritalin because she found me obnoxious and was sure I had ADHD (I don't) -and note she skipped past 'figure out if that's the issue' straight to 'drug the kid'. Parents raising issues and pushing for improvement happened, but in my experience it never caused schools to try to fix things; a student having difficulties was not responded to as evidence that school practices had problems, but rather as if the student was the problem and needed to stop inconveniencing the school.
I've heard stories of parents affecting change successfully, but the way these stories get told is conspicuous to me; they always get presented as if the success inherently is a notable event, clearly implying the storyteller rarely sees such happen at all. So it's not that I was particularly unlucky; this resistance to change is apparently pretty normal.
In practice, parent/teacher conferences seem to me to mostly be schools trying to convince parents everything is great.
tbh as a kid I was pretty confused by the letter ranking system. (Why is there no E grade? You go in alphabetical order, but then you skip E and have F as your bottom grade?...) It's weird to me even as an adult how accepted it is.
'Science' was physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, animal science, and probably a few other categories I'm forgetting. It was stupidly broad -as in, even though it was my favorite subject, I thought it was idiotic how much stuff got thrown under this one umbrella. No other subject type came close to this diversity.
'Memorize without understanding' doesn't quite have a word it that I'm aware, but 'parrot' gets used to mean 'saying stuff you don't actually understand', which usually implies memorizing stuff without understanding it. (Though it can apply when reading out something -if somebody prepares a speech, and then somebody else reads the speech aloud, you could call that 'parroting' the speech if they clearly don't actually get it)
DeleteAnd yes, I could faithfully recite times tables out to 12*12=144 with zero idea what multiplication meant. It was only years later that my mother explained it as being basically just a 'compressed' representation of addition; 5*10 means either 'add 5 ten times' or 'add 10 five times', both of which result in 50. This kindergarten was unusual; usually in America multiplication only gets taught after addition and subtraction are mastered. This times table thing was a point of pride for this kindergarten, presented as giving kids a 'head start' on math -while in actuality being disastrously stupid.
I actually got a fair amount of help outside lessons. Public Schools interpreted me largely as a dumb kid who needed help; I was in multiple Special Education programs throughout my time. ("Wait," you might be going. "Why did a teacher think you were too smart to be genuinely failing math?" There was an odd thing where school SYSTEMS put me in the 'dumb kid' box, but teachers who actually knew me universally thought I was smart but a bit lazy on topics I didn't like. It was very strange to live through) But I suspect you're asking about a different thing, and if I'm right the answer is 'no, that didn't happen' -students struggling with a topic might have a Nice Teacher take pity and volunteer some help, but this wasn't a real standard practice but rather a thing Renegade Teachers did entirely on their own.
And absolutely things would've gone better if I'd asked my mom earlier, but part of what was happening was I had no concept math mattered because of how atrociously this was handled, and I've never been sufficiently motivated by social stuff to care about my grades for their own sake. The year division came along was coincidently also the year 'word problems' came along (ie problems formulated as sentences describing a scenario: "You have 20 apples. Your five friends each want two apples. How many apples do you have left afterward?" rather than "10-2-2-2-2-2=?"), thus finally informing me that math was actually supposed to be a real-world-relevant skill; bizarrely, 'word problems' are stereotyped as difficult and advanced problems that frail child brains cope with more poorly, so in this regard my experience was very standard.
Ah, so it's not just Revelations having a skewed view of history, it's also that it does that thing of "We're The Good Guys, therefore if we do it, it's Good". Yeah... I don't know why, but I see that kind of thing a lot in bigger-budget games, regardless of country of origin. (Not that smaller studios never do this, but it's far less common in my experience) Though that... sounds above-average in moral awfulness...
DeleteFantasy fiction when I was growing up tended to have armies ride out and meet in the middle of nowhere to fight over nothing aside ideological/political motives: Good Prince rallies an army to fight Evil Prince's army. A battle occurs, and isn't covered much. Good Prince somehow contrives to have a dramatic 1v1 duel with Evil Prince in the middle of this, which Good Prince wins, which conveniently coincides with Evil Prince's army sounding the retreat or otherwise signaled to lose. Good Prince thus takes the throne because his competitor is dead, or because Evil Prince is sulking back home instead of continuing to try to convince people he should be king.
As a military kid who was playing a lot of military-themed games from a young age, I found it pretty confusing; I wanted to hear about terrain, troop compositions, equipment, flank attempts, and also wanted to know how the battle was supposed to accomplish anything except getting a lot of people killed. I actually had a pretty low opinion of fantasy as a kid, and only read as much as I did because I devoured basically every book in the house in an effort to stave off boredom; I preferred scifi, because military scifi usually covered SOME of this stuff, instead of none of it.
I'm surprised (and horrified, honestly) to hear non-English cursive is a thing that exists all. And just skimming a Wikipedia article on Russian cursive... yikes, it's even worse than English cursive about being unreadable!
I had music classes at only one school, for whatever reason. Art was more normal, but was basically handled as playtime -there wasn't any attempt to make it educational. Astronomy, as I noted earlier, got lumped under 'science' -I'd say it made up around 30% of my science classes? Sports was erratic -some of my schools had formal PE classes, others just... didn't. I never had a computer science class -I'm honestly not sure any school I went to even had a computer anywhere at the time. I'm basically entirely self-taught when it comes to computers, though my dad got into computers really quickly and fancied himself a tech person so I had a foundation to work off in real terms.
The GoG stuff is interesting. I knew GoG was willing to incorporate fan patches and whatnot, but I never thought I'd meet someone who worked on even rejected stuff.
...God.
ReplyDeleteFirst af all, have another virtual manly hug.
This is ridiculous. Not in the "funny" meaning. It's like your schools are built on either "you have a problem?" 1)YOU are the problem. You need fixing. 2)There is no problem. You just imagining it.
Ritalin? It's a brand name for methylphenidate.
1) In Russia this shit is legally forbidden due to causing addiction, very common negative effects and unconfirmed medical effectiveness.
2) This thing is used on 'children'?
3) "teacher wanted me put on Ritalin" - you meant she tried to force you to see a doctor and than somehow force him/her to prescribe you this thing? How would a teacher even do this? Or you tried to say that is actually possible for a teacher to force a kid to use something like it? It sounds completely insane but at this point I don't even know what to expect.
So your schools' system (kindergarten including) were irregulated semi-chaotic mess with everyone pretending it's normal and getting butthurt over anyone not fitting there. You know, at the beginnig of this discussion I thought that maybe it just needs some repair and painting, so to speak. Now it sounds like it may need a sledgehammer.
Um, if you COMPLETELY lacked understanding of math practical use in early age, how did understood how much time remained until X, for example? Surely you had situations like "cartoons start at 15:00, can I do X before it, if X will take about Y minutes?"
Or like "here is my notebook (not computer one) with stickers with characters from the show I really like. One page has place for 4 stickers, there are 24 pages, so I'll need a new notebook when I'll have X stickers".
There are few more Revelations things that make the whole "good Ottomans" thing even more confusing:
Delete1) I saw a theory that devs chose them just because they won historically, except certain things in the last 2 chapters would actually fit more (on emotional, thematic and logical level) if the hero's side would lose.
2) This series was inspired by "Alamut" book by Vladimir Bartol. It was directly confirmed in an interview. The Creed itself is directly copied. And in the book Assassins actually fought against Seljuk Turks. The first game had Assassins fight Templars instead and had not any Turks at all. Neither did the second. Nor did "Brotherhood" (on screen atleast). Now we actually got to the game with Turks in it - and they are Assassins' allies. And portrayed as good guys. For no logical reason or explanation.
3) A minor side quest in "Brotherhood" implied that Turks are Assassins' enemy. Well, implied does not equals confirmed. Except, as I only learned yesterday, an iOS side game directly told that Ottoman Empire creation and destruction of Eastern Roman Empire were made by the use of a Piece of Eden (read=person who did it was a conquering tyrannical megalomaniac, very propably related to the organisation of Assassins' mortal enemies). So it looks like "Revelations" outright retconned earlier lore for the sake of... what exactly?
This weird desicion of presenting Ottoman Empire as good guys and making the hero assist them becomes more and more nonsensical the more I think about it.
And this whole hypocritical idiocy of persuading player that "tyranny, oppression and slavery is bad, unless it's made by Ottomans, than it's good", "fighting against oppression and for freedom of your people is the most noble thing, except when it's against Ottomans - than it's utterly monstrous" and "common folk of any side are always victims of their rulers plans and deserve protection, except Byzantines, who deserve to die to last person" makes it almost surreal. With only ONE character ever noticing that something is clearly wrong here and leaving Assassins - and he gets "he betrayed us, thus his opinion is irrelevant".
It could make sense it the game was about "how people who do monstrous things can see themselves as heroes" or "how blind fanatism can distort a noble idea" or "how zealous patriotism can make people blind to evil their country does" (if the hero was a Turk instead of Italian) but the games' creators clearly portray Assasins as the morally right and heroic side. And Byzantines (along with a couple of ethnic minorities characters) as morally wrong. And clearly expect player to share this view.
And using specifically freaking Ottoman Empire for the informed good-guys-with-moral-license-for-usually-evil-things is just the cherry on the cake. Alright, I'm biased because I like Bysantium and I'm from a country that fought against Turks for centuries etc. But really, I have never even heard about a non-Turk/Azerbaijan person who had positive opinion on it. It had some individual cool people of course, but the empire in general...
Outside of things like "Canadian devs are somehow radical Turk nationalists", do you have any possible ideas what and why did devs tried to do here?
...It looks like good old Tolkien was a truly special man than. The older I become, the more I like his works.
DeleteBtw, Arnor/Gondor history is somewhat reminiscent of Western and Eastern Roman Empire, don't they? Alright, alright, I'll stop it.
Stereotypical Cheap Generic Russian Fantasy is about someone (almost always from reallife-like world) finding themself in magical world.
Or finding out that the world is secretly (or-not-so-secretly) controlled by mages/vampires/elves/someone else/all of the above, with out hero(ine) being atleast partially one of them and not knowing how to take it all.
Or, way more rarely, about a person from a minor fantasy kingdom being forced to learn that the world is very different from how (s)he imagined it - including history, hero(ine)'s country place in the world, and global events in general.
In bad case the hero(ine) just becomes uber-badass with almost every single important person of opposite gender being in love.
In better case hero(ine) journey can be relatively interesting and introspective. With conflicts about "what I thought I/things were" vs "what I/things actually are", trying to find place in the new life, having problems with "what is truly right" and "what is really wrong" etc.
This days there is also surge of "alternative history where Russian Empire still exist in XX(I) century and nobles are intrigue-loving born-mages" subgenre. Other countries often ruled by mage-nobility too. And Byzantium propably never fell.
I think my love of strategy games came from countur maps.
Through fandoms of most TBS are often disproportionally Russian.
Btw atleast in Spain of nineties schools used countur maps too.
Be glad you never saw doctor's Russian cursive. For some reason it looks completely incomprehensible for anyone who isn't one. Or pharmacy worker (not guaranteed). This days they are forced to print things instead, but earlier... Most people had no chance to understand what the hell a doctor wrote. It is possible that looking on it for long enough time may open you secrets of the universe through. Or drive you insane. Or tranform your body into gates for eldritch horrors.
We also had a foreign language lesson. My school only had English and French options. A class (well, more ike parents, but atleast in my case I was told that my opinion will be the deciding factor) chose one by majority of voices. We (and me personally) chose English. You can see the result :)
Through randomly skipping words in text or switching letters is not my English problem, but my general one and only started maybe couple of years ago.
About GoG - it was Warlords Battlecry 3. GoG Russian version is ...something. Full of bugs that neither original nor old Russian disc version had, and with very half-assed patch integration. As in - some things are like in 1.2, some are like in 1.3. I just wrote them a "what the hell" letter, where I mentioned that if I myself could fix this than surely they can. They actually got interested, asked me to show them my fixes to look at, liked them, than I also fixed some general game bugs (made separate pack for English - nothing text-related, only code, so don't worry) and they said they want to integrate it all in the game but need rights holder to agree. They also gave me a key for a free game of my choice, but it's activation interface was horrible - there was just pages of random games without any order. No sorting, no search, nothing. Oh, and far enough page would make the whole thing glitch and start from the beginning. Later they said that right holder doesn't allow adding anything to the game. And the key already expired by the time I remembered about it.
Yep, The Problem Is You (Or Doesn't Exist) was pretty standard. I mentioned the 'you're a bright kid, so clearly it's laziness that's why you're bad at thus subject' -that wasn't a one-off thing. I had multiple teachers, across multiple schools, across multiple states, all arrive at this conclusion. Some of them were jerks all-around, but even nice, patient, empathetic teachers expressed this interpretation; I think I had exactly one teacher genuinely grasp that my weak areas were real weaknesses.
DeleteRitalin-wise, teachers thankfully don't have THAT much power. She arranged a parent/teacher meeting, my mom showed up, miss teacher launched into her 'he never holds still, there's clearly something wrong with him, I think it's ADHD and you should put him on Ritalin' speech, and my mom was horrified and refused. But it's too easy to imagine a different parent trusting the teacher's judgment and implementing this demand without even checking with a doctor, so it's still deeply concerning.
And yes, Ritalin as an answer to ADHD kids was a standard response when I was a kid. I've never been comfortable with how readily Americans turn to drugs to 'fix' behavioral 'problems', given most such 'problems' seem to be less 'the person can't function in polite society' and more 'the person is grating to those around them'.
And yeah, American education is bad. There's a reason I left the system entirely and never went back -I actually had relatives try to pressure me to go to college, insisting It's Different From Non-College (You'll note the implicit agreement that they too hated school), and didn't because my webcomic binging involved a lot of getting glimpses of what college was like. (Lots of webcomics were started by people going to college, or who graduated high school early in the comic's life and went on to college) 'Mainstream' pop culture insisted that going to college is wonderful, getting a few years of freedom before going on to your dreary job and being tied down with a bunch of responsibilities, while the degree(s) would ensure you'd live Happily Ever After at a Nice Job. (Note the contradiction between 'Live Happily Ever After' and 'after college you go to a dreary job you hate'. Hmmm)
Webcomic artists generally explicitly repeated these sentiments, but then what I'd hear of their actual life was that college was one giant drain; they'd get massive student loans, and in exchange they'd... still be a cashier at a grocery store, or flipping burgers at a fast food place, or otherwise doing a job newly-minted high school graduates can do without the crushing student loan. It didn't paint a promising picture, and the stuff that sounded maybe genuinely positive was stuff I had no interest in. (ie college kids often party, drink, and otherwise have fun doing stuff their parents disapprove of -absolutely none of which has ever interested me)
Nowadays it's semi-widely known that people of my general generation have a notable fraction of them literally living in their parents' basement with a net worth of less than zero thanks to all that student debt. I've also since learned that student debt is uniquely awful -in America, at least, if you successfully declare bankruptcy, your debts are all forgiven; nobody can come after you and demand the money you owe them... buuut student loans are an exception; there's no escaping them. The government is willing to refinance you with a less miserable setup (Zero out the interest, let you pay in many more installments over a longer period), but you're paying all that money. Period.
Particularly morbid was seeing a commercial try to sell people on how valuable college is by laying out that people with degrees on average make some thousands of dollars more than people without degrees over the course of twenty years -and the amount in question sounded pretty sad BEFORE considering that it wasn't counting student debt in its calculations. (Unfortunately, it's been years and I didn't make notes so I couldn't tell you what it was exactly)
As for practical usage of math, I'm not sure how to articulate this. For starters, your questions touch on other weak areas of mine; I'm terrible with time in general, and long-term logistical thought was something I was atrocious at as a kid and still struggle with. So there was no 'okay, I have fifteen minutes before Favorite Cartoon comes on, what can I do that will take fifteen minutes or less?' And my intuitive grasp of value was genuinely nonexistent; my mom has stories of giving coins to me and my brother and having us pick out stuff we could afford, and my brother naturally understood that a small amount of change would probably be able to cover some candy but not a big toy's big box, whereas I would go to a thing I thought looked cool with absolutely no concept that my small amount of money probably couldn't cover it.
DeleteSo my lack of comprehension of math was cloaked some by other, possibly-related problems.
It's also the case that my practical understanding of math was meager, not quite nonexistent. Buuut I didn't intuitively understand that math problems that shared terminology with everyday statements shared terminology for a reason; I wasn't able to quite connect that '2+2=4' was a variation on 'our table has two chairs, we have four people who need to sit; go grab two more chairs'. I just interpreted math problems as abstract puzzle nonsense, same as a video game depicting a plumber jumping on evil mushrooms doesn't actually have any real relation to plumbers or mushrooms, even though there's verbal connections and whatnot. And hey, there's tons of words that get used in multiple ways that don't appear to overlap; a 'pound' is a unit of weight, but you can also 'pound' someone or something as in 'beat it viciously', which are radically different meanings.
And a lot of ordinary everyday stuff you can describe in math terms doesn't require mathematical skill to engage in; you pick up things until they're too heavy, or they start slipping out of your grasp, or whatever, you don't decide ahead of time to pick up some specific number of things such that difficulties counting higher than twenty causes you to be unable to pick up more than twenty distinct objects. If you have a blob of stuff you want to divide evenly with a friend, you can just shove the components into two masses that look about the same size rather than counting everything up and dividing it into two piles that are each exactly half that number. There's a lot of stuff like this where my near-nonexistent math comprehension didn't actually stop me from being able to do a thing, it just resulted in me using a solution not based in math skills -and when you're a kid, nobody is particularly concerned by this kind of thing. Even a kid who understands math just fine may well go with the 'this is my pile, and that's your pile, and they look about the same size so that's good enough' approach.
But it did result in real, if subtle, difficulties, so... still terrible that this happened.
Anyway...
DeleteThat's quite a strange mess you're describing with Revelations. I suspect this is a thing where if I experienced the game myself I'd pick up cultural context signaling stuff pointing to what this is rooted in, but with this level of 'distance' I probably can't make a useful guess. As a comparison point, Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak is a game I watched an LP of in part because this was in the wake of the Twin Towers being hit in 2001, where way too many games were blatantly endorsing going to the Middle East, killing everyone, and taking their oil; Deserts of Kharak takes place on a desert planet, so I thought that SURELY this game couldn't POSSIBLY do this nonsense, giving me a bit of a break from it, right?
And if someone else just gave me a description of the game's story, I'd probably not notice anything to suggest this expectation is naive, even if said description was raging about a lot of the stupid stuff that happens in the plot. (There's a lot of stupid stuff in this plot, so this isn't some big stretch)
But in seeing it myself, it was painfully obvious it was in fact more of this post-9/11 'go gloriously murder them all and take their valuables' sort of nonsense; in direct contradiction of the story painted by the original Homeworld, we get our desert planet having a SUPER-desert filled to the gills with evil religious zealots who are sitting on valuable goods our 'good guys' want, which of course necessitates murdering all the zealots in pursuit of getting the shinies -justice. I totally said justice.
So I kind of suspect Revelations' problems are something like this. As an alternate comparison point, Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty has a variety of narrative problems, but the most pertinent one to this conversation is that it's blatantly taking shots at US politics and US news stations, which ends up looking really janky and dumb when the President-analogue wasn't voted into his office and did in fact seize power primarily through a combination of the old regime collapsing and him stepping in with military backing to declare himself emperor of humanity. (There's a bunch of other narrative problems that fall inside this 'the story is talking about specific bits of America while pretending to be set in the Koprulu Sector' range, but this is already a long post, and part of my point in using Wings of Liberty as an example is I saw a LOT of complaining about Starcraft II's plot before I played it myself, and absolutely none of the complaints suggested to me that this stuff was underlying these problems)
So I wouldn't be surprised if Revelations is doing a similar 'shoving pet issues of the creators in' sort of thing, with a side effect of producing a historically-illiterate scenario that sides with very strange people to side with given the values expressed, where I'd maybe recognize it on sight if I played through myself but will probably never come up with a remotely-accurate guess in this conversation.
Yeah, Tolkien was an actual soldier, and it bleeds directly into his works. Even if he insisted World War II had nothing to do with Lord of the Rings... it's pretty noticeable to a lot of people that, roughly, he wrote The Fellowship of the Ring before World War II, wrote The Two Towers during World War II, and wrote Return of the King after World War II -and then the first book (Not that he wrote them as three books, but shhh) is pretty upbeat, the second book is grimly determined and it looks like it's not going to work out for the good guys, and the third book has everything turn out pretty okay, but with emotional scars and whatnot.
DeleteThat description of fantasy tropes mostly tracks to Western fantasy, honestly. And Japanese fantasy, for that matter. Devil's in the details, though... it's worth mentioning here that one of the only fantasy series I'm pretty unambiguously positive on (Lord of the Isles) was once again written by an actual soldier, who participated in the US/Vietnam war. It doesn't focus on battles much, but like Tolkien's works there's that background sense that things like logistics matter, the terrain exists and matters, people make decisions for tactical or strategic reasons (Or, quite often in Lord of the Isles' case, ruin things by making decisions off entirely different reasons), and otherwise warfare has qualities in common with real-life warfare.
I have noticed that turn-based strategy both has a lot of games in it from Russia, and that disproportionately often if I go digging on a given series I find Russian fansites -sometimes more readily than English fansites, even in cases where the series itself is absolutely not Russian.
Huh. Doctors having awful writing is a stereotype in America, too. That's interesting.
Foreign language lessons in America are another 'wait until high school' thing. And my understanding is plenty of high schools don't offer such at all, and that it's always completely optional; it's something I've seen people complain about as an example of... arrogance? Self-centeredness? Point is, I've seen people interpret it as America as a culture expecting other cultures to adapt themselves to America rather than meeting in the middle or the like. And I dunno, maybe, but with all the other school problems... I just shrug and write it off as one more way American schools need work.
Oooh, Warlords Battlecry 3! That's actually one of my favorite games of all time!... and for some reason the English GoG release includes a fan patch. So that's... odd. And frustrating to me personally, as this fan patch includes enabling a warning that your structures are being captured... in the form of declaring "Your base is being captured, BITCHES!!". Thanks, I really needed the gratuitous swearing... so... why did *this* fan patch get through but not yours? Ugh.
It isn't just "bad". It's reads like something form anti-utopia genre. You literally describe system that is built on idea kids must just semi-mindlessly memoryze selesctive information, don't ask any questions, and believe that the System is perfect and always right. With those who deson't fit are psychologically pressured or outirght put on addictive psyche-affecting drugs.
DeleteYou do understand that this is wrong? Not in "I have bad mermories about it and thus don't like it" way.
Ritalin just would've made you slow and quiet. It's often gives sleep problems and was noticed to cause (or advance) despression and/or communication problems with continued use.
Not to mention, again, that it is addictive. I don't know if it some different cultural perception or something but in Russia any drug/medicine/whatever that causes chemical addiction is seen quite negatively. And prescribing such things to children is just ...wow.
Than again, maybe you (not you personally) there think we here drink vodka all the day from right after being born (I never even tasted it btw), so your counrty is still progressive one here or something.
Your parents are awesome.
It's just merely A part of life, of course, but things like that make it easier to understand how some of Americans so easily believe some ourageoues nonsense about some other countries. I mean, if they see this shit as normal yet believe their country to be the most free-minded and advanced in the world...
I guess other social institutions must be WAY better built. Through I heard something about your medicine, like elite clinics being awesome but normal ones... Nah, I'm not going this way.
I heard about those loans and paying until old age jokes, but thought is was more like humorous overstatement.
Hm, well, I guess we all had various places where our brain go stuck for some reason. Somewhere in pre-school time, I remember having problem understanding relativeness of costs. Like, "those candies cost X roubles, and adults say they are costly. But than those guy bought a car for 100500 times of X roubles, and they say it was pretty cheap. But the latter if bigger number than the former? And cheaper is supposed to mean that it costs less. It doesn't make any sense!" It was actually a thing where adults had serious problems even understanding what exactly puzzled me so.
About being terrible with time - you mean only with counting it or more general? I often got angry at my brother because he often had problems with doing things by specific time and the like. Think, he needs to do X and need something of mine possessions for it. I say "Alright, but I'll need it by [time]. He goes "sure!". And than I get the thing 3 hours late, with him being "oh, I didn't noticed how late it is already". We argued A LOT about it back in time. Or, say, we have a table. That is very nice for doing homework. By a single person. So he could just enter I occupied and start complainig "oooh, just as I wanted to do homeword, YOU are sitting here! And than mom will compalin about me not doing it!" The problem is that I did my homework at the exactly. Same. Time. Every. Day. He did at completely random time, yet always complained if it happened to be at my time.
On Revelations - hm, thanks. Maybe there is indeed something real-life related that I don't see.
DeleteOne final note: in real-life Byzantium was actually the only major force in the region that Nizari Assassins didn't ever had a war with. Arabs? Crusaders? Turks? Mongols? Persians to an extent? All here. Yet Assassins never had any direct conflict (or any documented conflict at all) with Byzantium. Not that they really liked each other or anything, but more like their interests didn't stand on the way of each other, while their enemies were sometimes the same people. So the game's idea of making Byzantines THE enemy of Assassins of the region without any real explanation is getting only weirder and weirder when I try to find any kind of historical explanation. I think I'll stop at this point.
I mostly stopped caring Stacraft 2 story due to how dumb it fealt to me. And with Blizzard comments making it even more idiotic. My 2 favourite general mometns were:
1) Ending of Broodwar either implied ot outright said (I don't remember for sure) that Dominion was pretty much devoured by the Swarm, with Kerrigan living Mengsk alive so that he could suffer. In WoL, 4 years later, it's a Big Mighty Empire. What. Devs' answer? "Umm, cloning maybe?" Yeah, really.
2) I hated Kerrigan by the end of the first game. I mean, I liked her as a character, but as a person - DEATH! And I was full on with Reinor's oath to make her pay one day.
Than WoL happened, and now he is in love with her, wnats to save her and all that. And THAN Blizzard said that Reinor/Kerrigan lovestory is one of the central storylines of the whole saga and always has been, and hating it is means not getting the series. 'sigh'
It having a whole additional layer of idiocy that I missed due to cultural perception is not really surprising.
About TBS - you know, I sometimes wonder why it is so. I heard western jokes about weak pcs and such, but we actually have jokes on opposite - like "finally built a mighy PC of dreams, made videos that show GRAPHON in a very demanding game, showed everyone. Than go back to HoMM/Disciples/Age of Wonders etc. Said demanding game is gathering dust since then." Maybe it's countur maps global effects :)
Through if even a tsar may wanted to play chess one last time before death... Maybe it's something deeper.
Btw I noticed that westerners tend to condider RTS to be default strategy games, so to speak. For us it TBS.
In Russia it's generally believed languages (and not only) are easier to learn during childhood. Like, it's harder for adult people to 'get' other language(s).
Some Americans, to my experience, expect other adapt to them even when something is not about their county at all. But let's not go there.
About GoG - ??? Like, it literally says "bitches"? 'frustrated sigh' Russian version has nothing like it - or any fan patches, for that matter. It's just very buggy. And doesn't even have new Dark Elves building graphics (Doomwood themed) form 1.3 official patch, using old WBC2 (Yrm-themed) instead.
But if you ever was annoyed, say, by campaign things like first and third Zhur missions using the same map despite very different mission descriptions, or by game best shop (on Yrm) being buggy, well, now you know that being called "bitch" is clearly more important than fixing it.
I tend to be understated in my wording. Where someone else would turn to hyperbole ("This is the worst thing in the UNIVERSE!") I generally go the opposite direction and understate things. If I'm saying 'that's bad' about something obviously horrific -it's low-key black humor. So yes, I'm well aware US education systems read like a dystopia -there's a reason US children's fiction involves a lot of dystopias. It's not just because a dystopia is convenient for justifying child protagonists ("Why don't our protagonists get an adult's help, anyway?" "The System is evil and no adult can be trusted."), it's because it resonates.
DeleteAmerica is perfectly happy to scare its children with the idea that addictive drugs are mind control where one hit will permanently turn you into an addict. It's also perfectly happy to pretend there's a hard-and-fast divide between 'recreational drugs' (Which get presented as satanic temptation) and 'medical drugs'. (Which get presented as magic bullet solutions with no serious flaws) Yes, this is absolute nonsense. And it sounds like I really dodged a bullet there -I already have a depressive streak and communication difficulties. My life probably would've been a lot worse with a drug exacerbating those tendencies...
Yep. I've seen the same personal experience problem play out on a smaller scale -people who grow up in abusive households that gaslit their kids into thinking they're a particularly great family, where thus their expectations of what's normal skew extremely negative because if a GREAT household involves physical abuse and whatnot, then clearly a merely average household involves parents beating their kids to within an inch of their life. And then there's enough stuff like genocides going on out in the world that it's not that hard to find apparent validation for such a view, especially in conjunction with all the hidden info; sure is great to live in America, where no genocides EVER happened to ANYONE, right? Much better than those foreign countries! (lol)
Well, Schoolhouse Rocks was actually excellent edutainment, and was government-commissioned. There's a fair few examples of edutainment that's smart and well-researched -Blues Clues, for example, which had a given episode play five times in a row in a week. To an adult, this sounds insanely obnoxious; get to the new stuff already! But for the age range it's targeted at, they did research and found it takes about five repetitions for the kids to be in synch with things; 5 repetitions is a good rule of thumb for helping really young kids cement something in their memory. Sesame Street was always good, too, the Magic Schoolbus was incredibly good... so yes, there's bits that work out well. Just... not the mandatory school system everyone spends a large fraction of the first eighteen years of their lives in...
Ah, yeah, relative price talk annoyed me too. Nobody says "That's cheap for an expensive thing" or "That's expensive for a cheap thing". The baseline expectation of price is just assumed. I was never confused by it, exactly, but... hated it. Still kinda do, honestly. (On this site, I actually do tend to say things like 'that's cheap, in context', rather than leaving the baseline entirely implied like people normally do)
Time-wise... most people have a reasonably intuitive sense of time, at least no later than adulthood. A half hour passes, and even though they probably don't have it exactly right, they do have an accurate enough sense, where if they resolve to spend thirty minutes passing time because a show is coming on in thirty minutes (And for the sake of this example we'll just pretend they don't have access to a clock for some reason), they might switch to the show 5 minutes early or late but they were close. This only really breaks for most people if they get in a 'flow' state -that if someone is doing something and they really get into it, this time-tracking breaks basically entirely and people look up four hours later going 'oh crap I thought that was just an hour!'
DeleteFor me, that flow state is basically the default. It's better than when I was a kid, but honestly, not much. It's occluded by a combination of clock omnipresence (I know that walking to X location takes me 40 minutes because there's a clock at both ends for me to compare, that kind of thing), and me relying on assorted external signs of time passage. (Position of the sun, for example) So at this point I don't, from an outside perspective, look like I'm bad with time -but at a baseline level I'm basically 'blind' to time. It sounds like your brother might've had a similar issue...
Brood War doesn't tell us that the Dominion got eaten. Mengsk's army got stomped, but the Dominion's civilian end is intact at the end. It's the UED forces that get completely wiped out.
That said, you're still kind of right, in that WoL wants the Dominion to be a firmly entrenched super-empire Mengsk has been shaping for decades, a towering behemoth for Raynor's Raiders to be an underdog to, and that doesn't follow at all from Starcraft I and Brood War. Notably, the Koprulu Sector's scale got heavily retconned; in Starcraft I, there was something like 13 total planets that could be reasonably described as Terran population centers, and the Dominion scoops up the Confederate portion so it's, what, a third of that? Since there's three major Terran nation-entities in the Koprulu Sector. In Starcraft II, now there's... a lot more than that. And not 'Terrans colonized a bunch of stuff in four years', but 'this is how it's always been, honest'.
And yeah, Brood War's story is Kerrigan betraying everyone, everyone swearing vengeance on her (While she laughs at them), and Starcraft II just completely ignores all that. I played through Starcraft and Brood War again after I completed Starcraft II, and... sure, in retrospect I can see how the Kerrigan/Raynor romance might've actually been intended the whole time (Stuff like Raynor referring to Kerrigan as 'darling' and her not objecting, though I never took it that way before playing Starcraft II), but if so Brood War was very firm that it didn't really matter anymore. (Or if it did matter, it was in the sense that Raynor's anger is even stronger as a result, not in the sense that he'd go back on this vengeance-promise)
(Though honestly, I wouldn't hate it so much if Starcraft II had actually given us the glorious adventures of Power Couple Raynor And Kerrigan Kicking Butt Together. It's so agonizing a blatant retcon in part because the relationship is pretty irrelevant to the narrative -Wings of Liberty is chiefly about Raynor fighting Mengsk. Heart of the Swarm is chiefly about Kerrigan fighting Mengsk. Legacy of the Void is chiefly about the final battle against Amon. Nowhere in there is the Raynor/Kerrigan relationship actually important. The closest to it mattering is WoL forcing the final battle to be about de-Zerging Kerrigan, and this has the obvious, dire problem that THE AUDIENCE KNOWS IT'S NOT GOING TO STICK. Blizzard literally announced ahead of time the campaign order and names! So WoL having this 'happy' ending of Raynor 'saving' Kerrigan is just obviously stupid)
DeleteYeah, I dunno how to even begin to guess on the cultural contrast for strategy games. It's certainly interesting, though.
It's absolutely a scientifically proven thing that languages are easier to learn for kids -and not for the reasons people expect like 'kids are more malleable' or whatever. The human brain actually has a bunch of... I think phonemes was the term... point is, assorted possible sound combinations are sitting in a newborn's brain, and over the course of childhood your brain just deletes all the phonemes it's not hearing. So a kid who hasn't gotten around to deleting a given sound has a HUGE leg up in properly learning a language over an adult just for that reason. Nonetheless, last I heard foreign languages aren't really taught until high school... I've heard there's individual schools trying to act on this science and get started sooner? So maybe someday it'll be normal to teach a foreign language early...
And yep, it says 'bitches'. In all-caps. With multiple exclamation points. It's trivial to delete or replace, but still, I was pretty mad when I discovered this was one of the effects of the fan-patch that's built in. And I'm pretty dubious on a bunch of other changes it makes, like adding timers to most summons -a timer that persists even even you morph a Skeleton into a different unit as the Undead. When the Undead are blatantly built around using summons to skip the pain of dropping Gold on training Skeletons manually. I really should figure out if there's a way to undo all that on the GoG release -I haven't played it in years in part due to this nonsense.
Digging into the WBC3 thing, it's easier to deal with than I worried -GoG includes an offline installer that installs the last official patch rather than this unofficial nonsense- but it's also, bizarrely, a lot more widespread than I'd believed, with apparently Steam and Amazon versions also defaulting to this awful fanpatch. What the heck?...
DeleteIs there a single English word for "get better/recover from illness"?
DeleteAlso, about "parrot" verb, can it be used for, say, an adept of a religion/phylosophy/ideology who memorize exact words of the teachings without understanding meaning behind them?
Out of curiosity - does getting addicted to "good" drugs is seen as no really a bad thing as opposed to "bad" ones? Maybe like "bad" addiction makes people sell/steal stuff for the new dose (which is bad), while "good" one can be satisfied using local drugstore, so nothing bad happens?
Or average person does not believe that "good" drugs can cause it in the first place? Like "I'm totally fine, I can always stop, I just don't want to. NOW GIVE ME MY PILLS".
Speaking of genocides, I never played Assassin's Creed 3 but I plan to. I don't know full story but the general premise is about a Native guy, trained by a black guy, who fights on US side in the War of Independance. With GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH motto. I'm absolutely sure that it will work out perfectly for him and his people. And that the game will be 146% historically accurate.
I'm glad :)
I actually saw Magic Schoolbus.
Speaking of western cartoons - Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! I loved it.
Extreme ghostbusters too. Felt unfinished through.
Yes, it DOES sounds like my brother.
If I can wake up by the needed time without setting alarm clock, do I have super-good time sense lol? Still doesn't make me immune to the flow state through.
About Dominion - hm, maybe it was "wrong common knowledge" thing. I'm pretty sure that a lot of people shared ths opinion and that Blizzard did answer a question about it.
Also, didn't Protoss Empire was described as a pretty large thing with a lot of planets? And than Starcraft 2 portrays as barely having anything and dying out?
Oh, and the whole "godlike-Kerrigan-the-saviour" from the end of LotV was retarded.
I often have a problem with the whole "forgiven villain" thing. Much more often than not I find it being unwaranted and side with characters who distrust the ex-villain in question and are usually supposed to be seeing as wrong.
DeleteOh, Vergil (DMC5) fed a megapolis to the blood-drinking tree so that he could satiate his complexes? Let's forgive him because fans think he is cool
and "killing your family members is very bad" (game director's reasoning). I guess even if they are apocalyptical maniacs with childhood complexes who at the moment can't be stopped by anyone outside of their relatives.
Oh, the Horde (WC3) is totally good now. One of the main clans returned to drinking demon blood as soon as it faced a serious problem? Their leader sacrificed himself to kill the demon who provided the blood later, so it doesn't count. New cheftain wields the same warhammer as the previous one and considers him a heroic person? Weeeell, not everyone in the old Horde was bad, there were cool honorable poeple too! This previous chiefain was the very same guy who led the Horde through most of it's time in Azeroth? And who was so honorable that when losing he agreed to parlay with wit Alliance commander only to ambush and kill him. NO WOW, YOUR RETCON ABOUT "HONORABLE DUEL" IS NOT CANON FOR ME. Also, old "Bloodlust" spell was evil demonic magic. Current "Bloodlust" spell is perfectly fine healthy buff. Totally different. Theramore finds it hard to believe that Horde really changed? What bastards.
The Court and the Commonwealth (Age of Wonders 3) being forced to make peace with each other with the latter getting no punishment other than their Emperor officailly proclaming that he is not a god? It is the happy ending! They did a lot of shit? They were manipulated by Shadowborn, so they are victims too! Them commiting pogroms on the race that saved from from starving while blaming them? It was a few hundreds of years ago, why remember it now. No, the fact that a lot of races live more than that doesn't change a thing. Their human rulers, as soon as they got to power, changed the whole "all races working together" thing into slavery-using aggressive empire with racial segretation and god-emperor, that wage wars against races that do not want to obey and share their oi... mana crystals? It's the result of Human free will, and limiting it is bad, much worse than what said Commonwealth does. Some specific races were mostly relegated to slavery or otherwise oppressed? It's not Human fault that some races have serious problems with adapting to Human-led life-style.
You got the idea.
I know about the patch you speak of. Summon time is VERY bad idea indeed. And it has a lot of other very questionable balance changes. A virtual acquaintance of mine had a part in it. This patch was a good idea (fix bugs, restore some planned content) that gone off the rails (adding things for no reason, changing balance without thinking it through and/or considering all the consequenses, outright ignoring testers' and players' critics). Through I somehow never heard/noticed "BITCHES". But I'm not familiar with every single version of it. Btw I think they never fixed some of the bugs I did lol. Or a bug they they could fix but I couldn't as it's hardcoded and I have no access to the source code (fan patch creators got it from Steve Fawkner).
And if you care about balance - it's far from perfect in the clean game, but IMO much better than with the fan patch.
If you're asking how to wish me well, I don't think so? 'Convalesce' is technically a one-word way to refer to recovering from illness, but it's rarely heard outside a medical context. (As in, rarely used outside hospitals/doctors/other medical personnel; a parent wouldn't say their kid is convalescing, they'd say they're resting, or some other less technical term) It's also not verbable. (Until a bunch of people do so, anyway, because language 'rules' are mostly guidelines...)
DeleteYou wouldn't call someone preaching a parrot, but you might say they're parroting (the bible, the quran, their religion's founder, whatever). So yes, roughly.
Mostly the idea of addiction even being possible with 'good' drugs doesn't get acknowledged. I'm not sure how well this holds up to most Americans at this point as there's laws about mentioning problematic side effects, so you get commercials spending a while talking up the drug's good points and then rapid-fire spitting out a description of all the bad things that can happen. When I was a kid, this latter step would genuinely be a brief portion of the commercial. Nowadays the rapid-fire summary of bad outcomes, disclaimers about consulting your doctor, etc, is generally 50-75% of the commercial! But I've been caught off guard by people believing things with in-your-face, omnipresent evidence the belief is false, so... I'm not sure how much this 'good drugs are never addictive' nonsense has or has not eroded.
Huh. Assassin's Creed 3 sounds intriguing. Probably cringe-y, but... now you've got me curious.
Beetlejuice and Extreme Ghostbusters were great cartoons, yeah. Beetlejuice was one of my favorite cartoons as a kid -and in retrospect I'm kind of amazed it existed at all.
Korhal got assaulted by the UED and then Kerrigan's Swarm, so realistically I'd expect the civilian population/infrastructure to be devastated... but American pop culture tends to default to 'clean' warfare where armies fighting armies doesn't really affect civilians, and if the topic comes up it will be played up heavily, not be a background assumption. In Starcraft itself, unleashing the Zerg on Tarsonis gets Kerrigan expressing second thoughts, vs in Brood War the only doubts expressed are over Kerrigan's trustworthiness; nobody acknowledges the idea of civilians getting caught up in this invasion of Korhal. And the dialogue in the final mission implies Mengsk is going back to his Dominion and will rebuild his army; it doesn't paint a picture of the Dominion being devastated, just of their military being more or less gone. (American fiction is strangely prone to treating military personnel as if they pop out of the ground with no friends, family, prior jobs... a nation losing its army should have serious implications for its civilian sector, but American fiction rarely behaves as if it would)
And yes, Starcraft's manual informs us the Protoss had a far-flung empire. Brood War already seems to have forgotten this, but no overt contradictions come up -I didn't notice until my post-Starcraft II run. WoL and HoS seem to return to this vast empire idea (The Tal'darim handling presents them as at the fringes of Protoss society both socially and spatially, Kaldir has a Protoss colony...), but then LotV conspicuously collapses the Protoss to three planets: Auir, Shakuras, and the Tal'darim 'homeworld' of Slayn, with other Protoss sites we visit all being 'well, people did live centuries ago, but they also stopped centuries ago'. And the entire plot is focused on gathering allies; you'd expect the Spear of Adun to be visiting all Protoss planets in hopes of finding other people who escaped Amon's control. So... the lack of such references is conspicuous.
DeleteXel'Naga Kerrigan is a mess, but that'd require delving into more fundamental problems with Starcraft II as a sequel. I can if you're interested, but it'll be enough effort I'd want to have confirmation of interest beforehand.
Redemption arc stuff is often screwed-up, yeah. There's some inherent trickiness there, but... a lot of the time it reads less like 'we should give peace a chance', or 'we should end this cycle of violence', or whatever, and much more like 'you shouldn't hold their crimes against them. At all. Even though they're terrible crimes and our story karmically murders much less terrible people who had more probability of changing their behavior'. It's... concerning stuff.
Yeah, I discovered the WBC3 patch being widespread by virtue of finding a Steam thread where one of the patchers linked to 1.03 while calling everyone who wanted to go back to 1.03 'whiners' and otherwise being insulting. So... very much off the rails of Good Idea Land... which is sad, given the game has plenty of bugs that genuinely need fixing.
Yes, I wanted to wish you well. Поправляйся.
DeleteI'll tell if there will be something peculiar with Assassin's Creed 3. Or if I'll have questions.
I guess I'll start right now. Did Natives had any role in your War of Independance? Did any side got more sympathy from them?
What is problematic in Beetlejuice? The idea that one of protagonists is dead, I guess? And the general world of dead?
Or you meant it's surprising because the original live action movie was not children-oriented?
Wait, it's "middle-aged man and teen girl" thing maybe?
Or it had some social commentary that is not welcome in cartoons, that I missed for usual reason?
About people popping out of the ground - there are jokes about it in here, but it's seen as super-ability of fantasy/sci-fi humans. You know, like "Elves/Dwarves got a city destroyed! Now it's lost forever! Yes, even if have 10 others and aren't dying races in this setting. Humans got half of their country and most of it's army destroyed? And have a plague ot top? In the sequel 20 years later their empire will be twice as big. As will be their army."
As you noticed, I'm not exactly remember Starcraft lore good enough. Starcraft 2 killed my interest in the setting somehow. I mean not that I decided "I don't like the story, so I don't care anymore", I mean I actually err.. "passively" stopped caring about it at some point without any intentional effort/decision. If that makes sense to you.
It's fundamental problems as a sequel may very much be related to it. So if you have time - sure, go on. It will be interesting indeed, just keep in mind that I don't fully remember a lot of details. I actually never replayed Starcraft 2 campaigns.
Through at the every least I can say that I remember them 'feeling' very differently from Starcraft 1. I mean not inteface/we have a ship now/etc. but general 'world feel'. It's hard to explain such things. I liked old one better. It was colder but more... natural maybe?
I didn't like the whole idea of 'becoming' a Xel'Naga. And why the theoretic perfect creature idea gone from zerg+protoss to zerg+human? Or I again misremember it?
Also, didn't Starcraft 2 in general portrayed Protoss as dying race? I vaguely remember some ads that speaking about their race diminishing for centuries or something like it. And I know for sure (as in, I remember the discussions on it) that people was "What? Did something happened offscreen? Or it's any Elves[analogue]=dying race just because? So dumb."
There were natives fighting alongside colonists. I know this entirely through the lens of 'and then they got screwed and the colonists tried to largely write them out of history'. I haven't specifically heard of natives helping the British, but given the prior and all, I have no idea whether that's 'it didn't really happen' or 'it happened, but people tried to hide it, and succeeded'.
DeleteBeetlejuice-the-movie is REALLY dark if you follow it at all, in a 'child-inappropriate' manner. The cartoon softens some of the most relevant elements (Her biological parents cease to exist, her adopted parents are shifted to be quirky and a bit clueless but basically well-meaning, Beetlejuice himself is made much less of a creep...), but honestly it still feels a bit like if Aliens had gotten a cartoon aimed at children, in terms of 'Kids would want that, but what adults would greenlight such a thing??' That the cartoon retains the world of the dead and in fact has it be the main place for Lydia's adventures is the final fascinating bit of weirdness; American culture has long been really reluctant to let kids know death is a thing, like, at all. That Lydia is still a goth kid and this is treated as just her aesthetic, no biggie, is also unusual. At the time, the goth subculture was treated pretty poorly by general pop culture; 'goth kids are bad kids' type stuff. Even the movie is doing this, just with the qualifier that you're supposed to feel Lydia's bad decisions are sympathetic because her adoptive parents are awful.
Okay, so to contextualize the problems with Xel'Naga Kerrigan, I need to back up to Starcraft, except actually I need to back up to general pop culture tropes. Specifically, I need to talk about Our Glorious Leader.
See, a lot of pop culture (Across cultures, I should perhaps emphasize) is quick to present the audience with the idea that the leadership figures on Team Good are inherently meritful individuals who are the best person for the job and are of course acting in the best interest of the people under them, and certainly aren't trying to acquire power for themselves or otherwise having more self motives or priorities. This tends to be at its strongest when Our Glorious Leader is a protagonist/the primary protagonist, but it also crops up plenty even if no leadership figures are protagonists/perspective characters/whatever; our plucky village boy protagonist setting out to rebel against the Evil Empire might meet the Leader Of The Resistance, for example, in which case it's basically guaranteed that the Leader Of The Resistance will be presented as a noble soul who wants only justice for their people, is a master tactician/strategist/otherwise the best choice to be in charge of The Resistance's military decisions, etc.
The original Starcraft, meanwhile, is a punk plot ('Punk' in the sense of 'anti-authoritarian ideology'. not so much in terms of the aesthetic of the punk subculture), and absolutely does not believe in anything like this. A player used to these tropes is liable to slot Mengsk into this meme when first playing through the original Terran campaign, but by the end of that campaign the game has made it quite clear that Mengsk isn't really any better than the Confederacy he's fighting to tear down, and in fact his top priorities are 'kill as many Confederates as he can, regardless of the costs to others' and 'become the most powerful man in the Koprulu Sector, purely out of a greedy desire for power'.
DeleteBy a similar token, the Protoss hit this twice over: the manual informs us that the Protoss view themselves as benevolent guardians to the other species inside their empire, working to invisibly protect them from external dangers, with the Koprulu Sector Terrans explicitly included in this... and then the manual goes on to tell us that the Judicator Council decided the correct response to early Zerg encroachment on Terran worlds was to put them to the torch. And not even bother to explain to the Terrans why these aliens they didn't even know exist are suddenly melting Terran colonies unprovoked. Then when we get to the Protoss campaign, Aldaris is the 'face' of the Judicator Council, used to present to the audience the Judicator perspective and attitudes, and while Aldaris has dialogue that makes it clear he considers himself in part a shepherd to the Protoss people, at every step of the campaign other things get top priority; he sends the player Executor after Tassadar to drag him home in chains for the crime of hanging out with Dark Templar and picking up some of their tricks WHILE AUIR IS STILL OCCUPIED BY THE ZERG (Tassadar, understandably, responds with outraged disbelief; if the player didn't notice on their own how messed-up this is, the game grinds their nose into it), he refuses to accept Dark Templar help even though the information he has indicates they're the best shot at stopping the Zerg, he once again goes after Tassadar for being a 'traitor' (When everything Tassadar has done has been in pursuit of protecting Auir/stopping the Zerg), etc.
The only leadership figures in the original Starcraft who could be said to be good shepherds to their people are the Overmind and the Cerebrates, and of course the game is very firm that the Zerg are the Bad Guy Faction whose goals involve the extinction of all non-Zerg, so even if you take the view they're Good Bosses (Even though it's questionable to talk of the Zerg in this manner at all, given their wildly different social and biological structure; Zasz's Zerglings are less like a human general's loyal soldiers and more like that human general's literal fingers), that's the incredibly dark 'the only good bosses in the universe are on the most evil faction, and they don't make the faction any less evil'.
(I should note that it's easy to object to the wording of all this in that absolutely no character in Starcraft is a 'grunt on the ground'; they're all officers at minimum, and so realistically they're leadership figures too. But even though Fenix is in charge of the Antioch Province, we are never shown him doing anything leader-y, the game never attempts to talk about his capabilities as a leader, etc; in practice Raynor, non-Infested Kerrigan, Fenix, and Tassadar are written as underlings with bad bosses, and not as bosses themselves)
DeleteNow, this exact pattern of No Leadership Figure Can Be Trusted does not strictly continue into Brood War; Zeratul being a leadership figure is properly acknowledged and engaged with and he's written as a good leader. Raszagal is introduced and her only 'sin' is that Kerrigan somehow mind controlled her or infested her or something; the game is completely consistent that she's a worthy leader and a good person. Aldaris recants all his awful behavior from the prior game, and when he 'goes rogue' and our side just thinks he's being bigoted again, it turns out he actually was in the right here; Raszagal WAS corrupted by Kerrigan and we ARE fools for continuing to blithely trust Raszagal and work alongside Kerrigan.
But it doesn't actually reverse (The opening cinematic does an excellent job of conveying how little the UED leadership cares about the troops on the ground. The irony of Dugalle berating Stukov for not taking seriously what it means to unleash the Zerg on humans even as his flagship is abandoning UED troops to die is particularly great), and crucially to the Xel'Naga Kerrigan point is the Secret Mission heavily implying a big shift in narrative connotations to the Xel'Naga: in the original Starcraft manual, the Xel'Naga were presented as morally-ambiguous creator-deity sorts of figures. Their desire to make a 'perfect species' had no judgment passed on it in a direct sense, their creation of the Zerg and it going horribly wrong was clearly not intended, and their direct intervention with the Protoss pretty directly causing the Aeon of Strife was also not intended and something the Xel'Naga felt bad about; it's entirely valid to read the Xel'Naga in the original manual as well-intentioned creator-god figures who you should look up to. (Albeit not imitate their exact mistakes, one would assume)
Then the Secret Mission comes along and has Duran HEAVILY imply he's working for the Xel'Naga, that their plans to hybridize the Zerg and Protoss to produce their 'perfect being' is a plan that will end in the extermination of more or less all other life, and has Zeratul horrified and resolving to stop these dastardly plans, pretty well affirming that yes the player is also supposed to think this is all very bad. This thus bakes the punk themes much more deeply into the setting's foundations; this is comparable to having a fantasy setting reveal that God/the gods are also horrible leaders who don't actually have the best interests of mortals at heart, not just that mere mortals are regularly kind of awful to each other.
Then Starcraft II's Amon plot thread is derived pretty much entirely from the Secret Mission and... completely changes the message. Now the Xel'Naga are collectively Benevolent Creator Deities who want what's best for the universe and Duran is serving a specific rogue Xel'Naga who is a bad jerk trying to do bad things for bad reasons; the punk theme of 'the authorities don't necessarily have your best interests at heart' has been tossed aside in favor of an empty statement that there's a bad person being bad over there for bad reasons, I swear, so you should go stop him because being bad is bad.
Only it's even worse than that, because Starcraft II can't quite make up its mind on how to fit all this together. WoL runs with the Secret Mission framing where the Zerg/Protoss hybrids are inherently a horrifying, awful thing to be pursuing the creation of, and firmly implies that Amon is the only Xel'Naga who has any interest in this horrific goal. It also notices that this doesn't really align with the manual backstory of the Zerg/Protoss/Xel'Naga relationships, and has Imaginary Tassadar inform us through Zeratul that all the bad stuff there is also Amon's fault and totally not anything the other Xel'Naga intended. HotS (correctly) concludes that this isn't really an adequate patch job and does its damnedest to retcon things into something vaguely coherent, expanding on the 'it's all Amon's fault' thing by revealing that it was JUST Amon that visited Zerus and made the Swarm and set them on a collision course with the Protoss, not the Xel'Naga as a whole. Of course, this doesn't actually resolve things, as it contradicts WoL telling us the Overmind was mind-controlled by Amon into trying to kill the Protoss instead of trying to merge with them... while Amon making hybrids is supposed to be his sinister goal and now he has sole responsibility for the creation of the Swarm, so wouldn't he have just set the Overmind to do its original canon goal of merging with the Protoss?
DeleteAnd then LotV gets super-extra-confused, simultaneously telling us that the Xel'Naga producing a fusion of Pure In Essence and Pure In Form was always the general Xel'Naga plan, it was a benevolent plan that's necessary for the eternal cycle of the universe's continued existence, but also somehow Amon making such hybrids is inherently a bad thing that only ever results in loyal murderbots whose very existence is horrific, but in spite of that we have to turn Kerrigan into a hybrid herself because a hybrid body is necessary to contain Xel'Naga-ness... which we do by just having an existing Xel'Naga vomit Xel'Naga-ness onto her, rather than by having her do a Fusion Dance with Artanis (Or some other Protoss, whatever) like this whole 'Xel'Naga-viable bodies are made by fusing Purity of Essence with Purity of Form' plan explicitly tells us should be happening.
In short: Brood War explicitly extended the punk theme to the Xel'Naga, and then Starcraft II wanted to run off this EXACT BEAT but didn't actually want to retain this punk theme, and as a result the entire tortured path ending at 'Xel'Naga Kerrigan' is a contradictory mess because its foundations are a contradictory mess. Xel'Naga Kerrigan might've worked okay if Starcraft II had basically disavowed Brood War and solely used the not-clearly-evil Xel'Naga plot elements from the original Starcraft manual; it was always doomed to be awful nonsense the very second someone made the obviously broken decision to use the Secret Mission as the foundation for Starcraft II but wanting to have the Xel'Naga be good guys we should trust and approve of.
As for 'feel' and 'dying Protoss race', those are different issues but still pretty dumb.
The 'feel' thing I'm somewhat sympathetic to; the original Starcraft was made when computers were ugly, boxy things that got the job done but weren't at all aesthetically pleasing. It then imagines a future in which that's basically true of everything; this is exceedingly smart for a PC game of the time to do, as it resonates. You're playing it on the latest, most futuristic technology: the ugly box. Of course an even more futuristic set of technology being ugly boxes and whatnot will feel natural. And indeed, there's quite a lot of scifi from the days of early computing that has this kind of vibe, because this generalizes for anyone who spends a lot of time with computers.
DeleteThis also goes well with the punk themes, in that the Terrans of the Koprulu Sector aren't supposed to be concerned with making nice things that benefit the common person; the whole point is that we're looking at a world where authority figures are universally untrustworthy exploiters of everyone underneath them. Of course the technology they'd produce would be ugly and probably very unpleasant to use.
Then Starcraft II came along ten years later when computers had actually made great strides in ergonomics and general competency at being aesthetically pleasing; it was no longer 'in' to present the future as one where technology is ugly and bulky, especially not in video games, because PCs and console systems had gotten ever more sleek, nice-looking, and compact. The original Game Boy is a brick cosplaying as a calculator; the DS looks so much nicer and fits so much more utility in a package that feels much smaller. (I don't remember or care whether it's objectively larger or not; human aesthetic sense is pretty divorced from reality on certain topics) And it was a longstanding trend at that, so of COURSE the assumption now is that the future will be even sleeker and nicer; you're just looking at the current trend and projecting it onward.
In conjunction with Starcraft II actually broadly dropping the punk themes... we get a sleek, shiny future of ultramodern ultraconveniences. The game has forgotten its roots. And it's deeply wrong, yes.
Protoss-wise... SCII itself never directly states they're now a dying race, but I'm aware at this point there's an obnoxious amount of stuff that Starcraft II takes as Obviously Canonical that comes from books and whatnot released in the intervening years. (Basically everything to do with Tychus falls under this banner, for example) So I wouldn't be surprised if a book or comic or whatever directly states such. Regardless, yes, SCII certainly IMPLIES the Protoss have been dying out for centuries, with tons of Ancient But No Longer Occupied Protoss Sites coming up, completely forgetting all the 'Protoss empire safeguarding the species inside their vast borders' stuff. Including the implication that there's other sentient civilizations we just don't meet in Starcraft.
Hm, I checked on Iroquois Confederacy (it's the only historical Native organisation I know...) and 4 of it's tribes/nations actually joined British Empire, and only 2 - colonists.
DeleteAssassin's Creed 3 (soon) protagonist belongs to Mahawk nation, who fought on British side historically. So it's either another Revelations-like history rewrite, or he actually fights against his own people.
Also, few Russian sources I checked claim that Natives who were not neutral mostly supported/sympatised with British Empire, who had laws that put limits on where colonists could settle. After US victory said limits were removed, and lands of the tribes who supported Brits were confiscated as punishment.
English wikipedia agrees on Iroques Confederacy and general Natives sympathies atleast (I didn't go deep).
This certainly gives some context to US feelings towards Natives.
I only saw (and learned about existance of) Bettlejuice-the-movie years after the cartoon. Yeah, it's portrayal of the supposedly the same characters was unexpected. Also, are they like alternative universes or actually fit tigether somehow?
This days it's incredibly hard (if possible at all) to find Russian dub of the cartoon btw. Last time I checked is was only individual episodes.
And the old awesome dub of Extreme Ghosbusters was lost :( Later one suck.
I saw "Evil has good-to-their-people-only bosses, Good has noble-intentioned assholes/dogmas-before-reason blindmen/opportunistic pretenders" thing in Russian stuff a lot of times, so Starcraft never hit me as unusual in that regard.
And "Gods are jerks" honestly feels like overused trope by now, but I don't remember how did I felt about it back there. But Amon was not a thing I liked for sure. Additions of him in backstory did indeed felt contradictory and, well, dumb. He also felt like a "BIG UBERVILLAIN TO MAKE EVERYONE ALLY" - and I hate this trope.
Also, all this "COSMIC THREAT" story twists way too often tend to make the setting feel much smaller.
Speaking of losing roots (+1) and elder race(s) inexplicably becoming dying ones - are you familiar with Disciples 3 and/or Spellforce 3? I already mentioned them as examples of games with retcons that are both idiotic and pointless, but they can actually provide an example of almost every bad decision one can make in a sequel/prequel. Through in those cases different developers (or some specific people among them...) are part of problem.
Interesting stuff as far as the natives/Assassin's Creed 3 stuff. I'd not previously heard about the British having laws restricting colonial settlement locations, and all that does add some additional context on where some of the overall modern attitude started from.
DeleteI too only saw the Beetlejuice movie years after watching much of the cartoon, and was really jarred by it -Beetlejuice himself in particular is SUCH a creep in the movie, where in the cartoon he's gross and all but aside being a bit obnoxious he's basically a nice fellow. I sort of regretted watching the movie the first time. I think it's a decent movie at this point, but it's absolutely not More Of The Cartoon's Awesomeness. And in terms of fitting together, I started out thinking the cartoon was supposed to be a sequel series, but at this point I'm pretty sure it's not really possible to reconcile them and that you're not supposed to connect them as one setting/story. Among other points, a detail that I didn't recognize the significance of as a kid and that may well have got lost in translation is that the realm of the dead in the cartoon is getting called the 'neither-realm' -not the nether-realm. (I'd never heard the term 'nether' before I saw the cartoon, and so for one thing didn't realize it was using a different pronunciation from the word 'nether') And in a lot of ways the cartoon treats it like a wild parallel dimension that happens to have skeletons and whatnot populating it rather than as an actual afterlife.
tbh I think 'gods are jerks' is as common as it is precisely due to the cultural context stuff we've been talking about -that people in lots of places don't really have faith in their leadership and so on, with jerk gods being a stand-in for directly criticizing the government and whatnot. And yeah, Amon as this ultimate threat for everyone to rally against... for one thing, it's a direct repeat of Warcraft III and Archimonde. For another, the plot uses it so badly/incoherently; we've got a literal omnicidal maniac with the power to pull it off, but it takes forever for people to start rallying against him, and in fact the first two campaigns are spent primarily focused on screwing over Mengsk, with only token, poorly-thought-out and completely non-credible attempts partway through HotS to suggest that Mengsk has any connection to Amon. And yeah, there's... tons of reasons why I don't like how often stories try to have universal threats; there's so, SO many problems it brings in, and very few advantages.
That said, at this point I'm... somewhat sympathetic to Starcraft II's issues, in that there's elements of it I suspect went wrong through no one's fault in particular. Like, Starcraft and Brood War were both blatantly setting up for the possibility of a sequel to add in additional factions; Starcraft's manual gives us the Umojan Protectorate and Kel-Morian Combine as alternate major Terran factions that didn't get coverage in the campaign, it also has the references to alien civilizations inside the Protoss empire, and then Brood War heavily implies we're going to get 1-2 additional factions; either the Xel'Naga with their hybrid creations as a singular faction, or possibly the hybrids as one faction and the Xel'Naga as another faction. (They're 0 for 2 on 'engineering a species that then is loyal to their interests', it would be entirely unsurprising for this streak of failure to continue)
DeleteBut then Starcraft became The First E-sport, and Blizzard committed -understandably- to trying to keep the multiplayer really close to the original Starcraft in assorted ways, and I kind of suspect this is the entire reason Starcraft II sticks stringently to the original three factions, with Amon's hybrids getting only limited campaign representation.
By a similar token, I kind of suspect part of what happened is what I think of as Angry Music Band Syndrome -you see bands that get very successful off making music channeling their frustrations with assorted things wrong with their lives, where this resonates with a lot of people because their lives have the same problems to be angry over, and then once they're successful they crash and burn because their lives are actually pretty nice now and they can't channel the rage that got them their success in the first place because they're not angry now that they have money and have resolved or substantially reduced a lot of the problems they had.
And the thing is, at this point I'm pretty sure LOTS of creative works are constructed first and foremost as reflections of the lives of the creators. Which is a model that means your 'compass' for how to build your stories will change radically as your life circumstances change! So I suspect that, basically, Blizzard as a company changed so much that even returning employees were in a radically different lifespace from when they were involved in the original Starcraft, and this is what grounds a lot of stuff like the themes reversing.
Though I'm still less sympathetic to this particular problem. Even if your first impulse in writing/worldbuilding/etc is at odds with how you used to think, it's not like serious contradictions are impossible to see...
I'm unfamiliar with Disciples 3, and am only limitedly familiar with Disciples II -I played the Gold Edition some at one point, but never completed even one campaign. It seemed interesting but not very well put together. I'm actually (slowly) trying to work through Spellforce 3 right now and would prefer to avoid spoilers for it.
Digged some more on Natives and US Independance War.
DeleteIn 1755-1756, British Empire (BE) created 2 departments that were responsible for Natives-related stuff. Those departments answered directly to imperial leadership and officially ignored colonial governors, which the latter saw as unfair limits of their power.
By 1763 BE proclaimed all the lands west of Appalachian Mountains as reserved for Natives - settling there is legally forbidded for colonists and is a crime against the crown (wow). And if I got the mountains right, it's pretty much most of modern US territory. It was mostly believed to be a temporal law, but colonists got really angry anyway.
There were conflicts between imperial forces and Natives, but there were many more cases of imperial courts taking Natives side in their conflicts with colonists (which made the latter angrier too).
At the beginning of the war both sides officailly claimed that they do not want to involve Natives, but secretly negotiated with them. Leke I said earlier, BE was more successful.
When BE accepted independance of colonies, they officially accepted forbidden-to-settle lands as belonging to colonies too, which Natives saw as betrayal. There were British politicians and diplomats who too saw it as dishonorable and and the like, but...
Anyway, after the war colonists saw themsleves as rightful legal rulers of all the lands there, while Natives from beyond the moutains very much disagreed and saw themselves as independant.
It will be interesting to see to compare Assassin's Creed 3 portrayal with it.
Right, uber-important Mengsk! That was another thing I disliked but forgot to mention. I mean, he always was important charcter, but in Starcraft 2 there is waaaay too much focus on him.
I generally agree with your thoughts on reasons for Starcraft 2 being as it is, but still believe they could do better if they would made more effort in right directions.
On Spellforce - the original 2-games series kinda has a problem in that a lot of lore was told through info on official sites and the like. Through Spellforce 3 makes a lot of callbacks to that lore - but usually twist it too. Still, I was mostly sympathetic towards it originally.
Soul Harvest expansion killed any sympathy I had. Spoilers aside, it feels like a cringy fanfic, and clearly written for another universe to boot. Well, it actually is, but that's another story.
Disciples 2 is a game that is not Russian yet somehow was way more popular here than anywhere else. And than developers of the third game actually were Russian - and believed that the game should be oriented on western auditory and on new players as opposed to the fanbase. Oh, and one of them once openly said that this series sucks and it's fans are just edgelords who only play it for grim visuals and DESPAIR. Yeeeah.
DeleteThis series before D3 had this thing where campaigns of different races happened at the same time, which allowed to see (or hear of) events from diffrent sides. And there were contradictons too - campaigns were supposed to be seen as "how each race remember those times", which was pretty cool IMO.
Anyway, it's setting can be pretty interesting once you get into it, and had some unusual themes that D3 removed without any in-game explanation. If you don't fear spoilers, there are, among others:
1) Human Empire (aka the playable human faction) is the old-declining-and-despairing-civilisation-that-presents-itself-as-heroic-but-has-dark-backstory-unknown-to-most. Not Elves. Not Dwarves. Humans.
They also had interesting theme in that their campaings always gave the least amount of info on stuff happening large scale. This worked well with Humans themselves having the most limited knowledge of the setting history.
D3 instead portrays them as generic "heroic" expansive plucky Humans with their angels mostly being genuinely good guys (also way more mysterious and mighty and all that than they were portrayed in earlier games). "Heroic" in quotes because devs intended them to be seeing like this, but they actually look like a whole race of assholish Mary Sues. It's not just my personal opinion, in case you are wondering.
Also, in earlier games human(s) believeing themselves to be 'special' always led to some bad things. For them including. In D3 they are basically officially special. So very special that there is a whole mission about showing who badass they are compared to enyone else. There is also this weird thing with the game expecting you simpathise with the Empire regardless of whose campaing you actually play.
Oh, and the god they worship (boss of the "good" angels) at one point described as the only real god - everyone else are just his angels who think too much of themselves. But this was so retarded that everyone pretend that never happened :)
Gameplay-wise they were changed from physically-weakest-but-most-numerous (and with HEALING) to jack-of-all-trades with highest average damage. And still with HEALING. And they were outright OP at earlier versions.
2) Demons who are a rageful destructive race created by Satan-like god is very common. Demons being a 'dying' race with "Satan" originally being an innocent guy, forced to suffer for for sins commited by Humans (who listened to "good" angels) is rather unusual. And "Satan" is dying too - he is so ANGRY because he wants to have revenge before the end. Oh, and he is the creator of humanity too. And of that giant rock that is the base of a planet. Humans that serve/worship demons thus are returned to the rightful owner, so to speak. Some by force. Some by their own will.
DeleteTo my experience, A LOT of players felt sorry for him. If he would only focus his hatred on "good" angels and Human Empire (instead of the world itself), I have a strong suspicion that many fans would see him as mostly alright guy, considering the setting. I personaly wouldn't through.
D3 instead portrays Demons as generic hellish hordes, ruled by, well, mighty not-Satan. They are not dying, their "Satan" is not dying and is in fact so mighty that he can send avatars into the world (?!), and they have no themes of tragedy or despair about them. D3 also for some reason pushes theme of "Satan" as THE creator of life, despite his only living creations being Humans and Demons. They were the last major races created (not counting Undead, who are not exactly a created race) and they both are kinda defective, so... Plants-animals-etc. were created by another people. Mostly - by another specific guy.
3) Elven Alliance is the most (in)famous faction of the series in regards to generating butthurt. They are also the race whose whole theme, idea and role in the world was changed in D3 for no logical reason. So, where to begin...
Basically, it this setting Elves for the most of history were bunch of either savage social darwinist barbarian tribes (local wood elves) and small kingdoms of the most peaceful, diplomatic and racially tolerant people around (local high elves). And they were kind of butt-monkey of the universe ever since their original county got destroyed in the ancient times. And it was their god who created plants, animals, Elves and this setting analogue Jesus (whose ressurection, due to mad goddess of death plot, was a montrous thing btw). He was dead for the most of history through.
During the games the god comes back, and eventually most of Elves unite in the said Alliance. And than SMASH. United Elves are portrayed as pretty much as steamroller. Human Empire and Dwarven Clans united together, with superior numbers and tons of other advantages? Now Dwarves are VERY dying race, while Human Emperor runs without even stepping in the battlefield while his former soldiers now work at building Elven walls until death. Alliance vanguard's town got surrounded by the largest Orc Horde EVAR? No, it's not about them heroically dying or help coming at the last moment. It's about piles of Orc corpses. God wants Elves to bring war to the literal realm of death at the opposite side of the continent? This is insanity? THIS!IS!!ALLIANCE!!! 'kicks Thanatos'
There was also this really unusual thing when most of other races are dying/declinig - but Elves don't. Humans do. Dwarves do. Demons do. 'Some' specific Elven nations do. Elves in general do not. If anything, they are rising.
Elven struggles instead caused by inner problems - split between wood and high elves*, religious problems too; their once Big Good of a god got some something like split personalty with time, with 'bad' personality pretty believing that the world and it's races are beyond salvation, so...
*Original devs planned in their Disciples 3 to actually split them, both in lore and in gameplay (making them different playable races).
Elven Alliance was VERY polarising faction among players. A lot of people who dislike them like to see them as villains (they killed some very sympathetic characters of other races, not to mention helping Humans and especially Dwarves to become even more declining), but according to Word of God, they were actually THE heroes in the grand picture. And there was indeed a moment in-game where the human god helps them with basically "greater good" reasoning.
DeleteI remember being quite surprised by all this the first when I first played this game. I can't deny that their campaigns are my most favourite in the series through. And that solving world's mess by beating the shit out of everyone can feel pretty cathartic.
Disciples 3 somehow portrays them as stereotipic nature-loving declining Elves. Nobody fears them at all, in fact, they are treated as butt monkey in story. Alliance is called this way but is portrayed as a kingdom (without inner racial or religious problems to boot), and one mostly consisting of just forests with a few cities among them. It's also treated as if it's something old (it exists for about a century by that point when most countries are thousands of years old). Non-Alliance Elves are seemingly do not exist anymore. The mighty god has next to role in the story - he somehow comes to earth to have sex with a mermaid whom he believes to be his wife, than literally forgets about her and goes away. All during a single cutscene. Yes, it's just as "...what"-inducing in-game. Religious theme in general is essentailly non-existant. And they have druids for some reason, despite druidism being Dwarven things in the setting. And they are the most passive race of the story and generally feel very um... colorless? Forgettable? SOmething like it - exactly the opposite of D2 portrayal.
And they are really underpowered balance-wise. They literally have one alright army composition and one strong (just spamming their single strongest unit lol).
And their gameplay idea was changed from "high-damage rush with smaller choice of units" to "fast but squishy and weak (by far lowest average damage)" And still with smallest choice of units - which is more serious problem than in D2 by itself and becomes even worse due to Alliance having the worst internal balance.
...It was not planned to be so long.
Ah, yeah, the Appalachian Mountains are just west of the East Coast -basically, any expansion beyond the original thirteen colonies was forbidden, which is, yeah, well over half the modern US territory. So that's a lot of interesting info that was basically hidden by my history classes...
DeleteAnd yeah, Mengsk eating 2/3rds of the Starcraft II saga is outrageous, especially alongside IMMEDIATELY dropping in Amon's existence -why are we spending so much time fighting a regular human dictator and not the UNIVERSE-DOOMING GOD-ALIEN? If Amon hadn't been revealed until, like, the very end of Heart of the Swarm, sure, fine, but no, we get Zeratul in all his out-of-character non-glory ambushing Raynor with the info that the universe itself is threatened, and... Raynor listens to all that, then chucks the memory crystal in a closet and gets back to the very important business of de-zerging his girlfriend. And never mentions any of this Doom Of The Universe stuff to her. What a hero. /sarcasm
I absolutely think Starcraft II could've, and should've, had a better plot -I have a lot of criticisms rooted in, basically, it looks to me like parts of the story are broken because Blizzard's corporate culture went very wrong. Like, Raynor's handling is another example of the removal/reversal of the punk themes, where at one point we get some of his low-level guys quite rightly going 'we're supposed to fight AGAINST, the Dominion, not ALONGSIDE it, what is wrong with Raynor??', and then Raynor... tells them they can walk if they hate it so much. There's a huge number of reasons this is stupid, but the one I'm getting at right now is that this inexplicably causes his crew to go 'THERE'S the Raynor we know and love' and stop complaining, which makes NO sense as a reaction to Raynor going 'my way or the highway'. Raynor is literally engaging in the kind of behavior the original Starcraft was directly criticizing, but now we're intended to take it as a positive. And I suspect this is growing directly out of Blizzard corporate culture stuff, where the bosses are out of touch, enough so as to completely misread how people respond to their behavior. (As in, I kind of suspect somebody delivered a 'walk if you hate what we're doing' ultimatum to some employees, got stunned/horrified silence as a response, and honestly misread it as people thinking that's a reasonable position)
Which is a long-winded way of saying that there's lots of narrative problems I suspect exist by virtue of Blizzard itself being riddled with problems that really ought to have been getting addressed BEFORE the relatively recent scandals coming to light. I'm not terribly sympathetic to 'our story has strong shades of lionizing awful bosses because the writers are awful bosses who are trying to convince everyone they're totally great'.
It's just I do think certain other problems are... accidents of history, I guess. As in, I'm genuinely curious what Starcraft II might have been like if Starcraft had been successful enough to justify a sequel but not been The Original E-sport, and Blizzard hadn't made World Of Moneyprinting; it seems likely such a timeline would've stayed much truer to the original story.
DeleteI've been pretty positive on Spellforce 3 so far. I still haven't played Demons of the Past, but overall Spellforce 2 comes across like it was made by people who wanted to make their own version of Warcraft III and absolutely hated the original Spellforce, with even stuff that called back to older lore twisting it up in horrific ways. ("Hey, remember Blades? Remember how those had a cool aesthetic but horrifying backstory that emphasized what a monster Young Rohen is? Here, you can use Blades yourself, but minus all the murder and whatnot fueling your deathless soldiers!... and also minus the original aesthetic. Wait, why are we even pretending these are Blades?... whatever, we're convinced we're making a game for morons anyway, they probably won't notice.") Spellforce 3, out of what I've seen so far, has been pretty faithful to the original lore AND gameplay, while ironing out a lot of the flaws. (I really love the new worker system; it's basically everything I liked about SF1's worker mechanics, but minus all the tedious micromanagement)
The Disciples series certainly seemed interesting lore-wise when I was playing, I just couldn't get past the clunky gameplay. Though I'm surprised to hear how unusual the elves were -my initial impression of them seemed by far the most generic form of forest elf possible. (Though my brief play gave me the impression their mechanics were more solid than the older factions)
The stuff with the third game being made by a Russian developer who expressly targeted Western audiences is... bizarre. I'll never understand why I see this kind of story intermittently; "(Series) is really popular in (region). Let's have (region) develop the next game!... and expressly target NOT their home region." It's not common, exactly, but it's so backwards I'm baffled I exist in a reality where I've heard of it at all, let alone more than once.
Well, Blizzard corporate culture was infamous (in certain circles atleast) long before the scandals. And their bosses being quite... interesting... people is a known thing too.
DeleteFaith and Destiny and Demons of the Past are literally game-fication of fanfiction, written by a guy from old official forum and made by different people from original team. Pretty much no one considers them canon.
Spellforce 2 was actually made by the exactly thr same people that made the first game and it's expansions, through I agree that simplification and a lot of changes in general were steps in the wrong way. Apparently, they received a lot of feedback about Spellforce1 being too complicated (in both RPG and RTS aspect). Yeeeaaah.
Also, IMO Dark Elves redesign is just ..ugh.
SF2 "Blades" were originally supposed to be Shapers' constructs. Dragon Storm in general was rather hastily done - starting with level 10 character was no exactly a purposeful idea.
Spellforce 3 actually have a lot of contradiciton to the time period it is placed or how exactly stuff hapenned (it's semi-based on some of backstory tales from old original site). I can give you link to a video telling about some of this, if you want. Or point some myself.
There are some historical dates mistakes too.
On Disciples Elves - them looking not really unusual in any way could have actully helped to make their portrayal in story and campaigns so unexpected.
I like their D2 design much more tham D3 btw. Well, except for the giant ears.
I agree about bizarrness.
But game makers in general may have some interesting way of thinking.
I mean, HoMM7 (possibly HoMM6 too) got so centered on Griffin familiy because, according to a former developer (worked on HoMM6 expansion, Homm7, it's expansion and Might&Magic X), a financial expert/analyst/something invited from US basically told Ubisoft "HoMM3 is the most popular game of the series. It has Griffin (beast) as symbol. Thus you should focus on Griffin stuff, like this Griffin-named bloodline you have". Ubisoft higher ups reacttion? "It makes perfect sense!" To devs: "do like he said". I leave lower-ranked people opinion on this logic to you imagination.