World War Moink

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Mothra
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Re: World War Moink

Postby Mothra » Sun Dec 21, 2014 5:01 am

Cherry is my main scout. Every time she takes a man's life, she goes a girly hop in place and blurts out, "Like, duh!!"

It is her requiem.

She also gabs with the other women, losing all focus. She's amazing. Use her.

You could also roll with Ted, who styles himself a stand-up comedian and murders men with a chuckle and a cheery "Hi, my name is Ted!"

Ted was tragically crushed under a comically massive train last mission, in my campaign.

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Re: World War Moink

Postby Mongrel » Sun Dec 21, 2014 12:18 pm

Yeah, Ted is definitely one of the freakier recruits for kill lines. By train do mean you got him run over in Chapter 16?

Melville has the Chatty Cathy attribute too, so that gets funny sometimes.

Using Aisha is SUPER CREEPY. She's TWELVE. Jesus Christ, Sega. Actually, in general, it's funny how many of the most timid, or panicky (every one of the characters with the panicky debuff is a shocktrooper), or weak characters are SHOCKTROOPERS. I mean, at least Kevin has an excuse, but the Gallian Militia sure has a few things to answer for.

Oh, apropos of nothing in particular, Audrey's bio after you unlock her potential is, uh, something else.
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Re: World War Moink

Postby Mothra » Sun Dec 21, 2014 1:45 pm

He was standing at the starting point in the GIANTHOVERTANK redirection mission, and I ended up moving the 'Weiss twice instead of him once.

I had a second where I contemplated re-starting the mission, but then I thought, "well, it is a pretty good way to be rid of Ted..." and BAM first character death of the campaign.

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Re: World War Moink

Postby Mongrel » Sun Dec 21, 2014 2:23 pm

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Re: World War Moink

Postby Mongrel » Sun Jan 18, 2015 1:25 am

Finally got around to trying Hard skirmishes.

Holy fuck, these things are brutal, I mean seriously fucking brutal. Enemy accuracy, damage, numbers, and CP are all massively increased. Woweeeee.

I'm not even talking about Expert skirmishes which I still haven't looked at (I'm afraid, Dave), just Hard.

At the most basic level you simply cannot leave a unit in any sort of exposed position at the end of your turn. It WILL die. Even with cover (sandbags) your dudes still might die if you don't have enough of a crossfire set up against incoming troops (i.e. you've got one or two guys way out in front).

Your best shocktroops cannot charge into two enemy shocktroopers - death is guaranteed in this case. Even charging into a single shocktrooper is risky and will leave your trooper with seriously low HP) and your starting positions are garbage.

You will HAVE to use tanks and use them heavily. All of a sudden Zaka has shot from being a boat anchor that you rely on for CP to being INCREDIBLY useful (with the flamethrower, which will often be better than the Edelweiss' mortar) as his tank is one of the only units that can charge into enemy fire and take out strong positions or multiple dudes.

Dropped Musaad and went back down to 5 scouts as well as abandoning all use of royal weapons for scouts - it's KAR 8's and KAR 9's only now. Picked up Audrey to go back up to 4 Lancers and get a second Lancer with Ultimate Anti-Armour.
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Re: World War Moink

Postby nosimpleway » Sun Jan 18, 2015 3:08 am

Mongrel wrote:I'm not even talking about Expert skirmishes which I still haven't looked at (I'm afraid, Dave), just Hard.


Whatever the most difficult mode is, don't bother. The first one is your army, in a small group, fucking surrounded by enemy gunners and tanks. If you can't leave anyone exposed at the end of their turn in Hard, you can't have anyone exposed at the start of your turn in Extreme, or whatever bullshit mode is past Extreme if there is one. In the one time I tried that, I actually lost one of the guys in my team who hadn't gone yet, because the guy who was moving took so much crossfire there were enough stray bullets to take out someone else in the background.

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Re: World War Moink

Postby Mongrel » Sun Jan 18, 2015 3:11 am

That was already happening on Hard.

One thing I ought to be using way more is orders. Of course your CP has already been cut, soooo...

In fact, when you boil it down, the gross disparity in CP is really the worst problem.

One thing's for sure: Starting with a full roster on Hard or Expert is probably just going to result in more body pickups to no effect.
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Re: World War Moink

Postby Mongrel » Sun Jan 18, 2015 10:47 pm

Okay, weirdly the Hard skirmishes have been getting... easier as I go on. So far I've tried the first 4

1 - [Bruhl Outskirts] Ugly as fuck. You start surrounded a shit ton of dudes and will probably lose your shirt. I've managed a B.
2 - [Vasel Riverside] Zaka is EVERYTHING on this map, which is still pretty fucking rough. Seems unwinnable if you get bogged down because the enemy gets huge fat reinforcements as time goes on, but if you keep the pressure on and manage good Zaka flamethrower sweeps you can get in there just quick enough to take them down. Managed an A, actually.
3 - [Kloden Wildwood] This one is actually much easier to survive, but the enemy is well dug-in with very strong defensive positions, so cracking the nut takes a while. Managed a D so far.
4 - [Barious Desert] Well, Barious is always stupidly easy and apparently "Hard" is no change. The map is blanketed with tanks, but Jann and Audrey just bust out their Ultimate Anti-Armour brooms and the rest is pretty easy. Getting an A was no trouble.

I find it kind of lame that the hardest skirmish is just a cauldron of fire. There's no real reward for positional play, just gaming puzzle shit with Zaka. Way more fun to actually let you use your infantry and give you genuine choices. #2 was a bit better for this, but I'm not a fan of how much you're railroaded into using one very particular unit so very heavily.
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Re: World War Moink

Postby Mongrel » Sat Feb 21, 2015 1:47 pm

FYI, for those of you interested in a secret "Hard mode" apparently, at 60 FPS or higher the rates for interception fire are actually higher. HOW-SO-EVER, there's a patch coming today to fix this. So if you ever want to try this "hard mode" you may wish to disable automatic patching for the game in Steam.

(I think I've been playing it at 30 FPS?)

EDIT: Oh right, you can't disable automatic updates (except by forcing the issue by either copying the entire game to another folder or making the game folder read-only). I had forgotten Steam's seamy underbelly.
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Re: World War Moink

Postby IGNORE ME » Sun Feb 22, 2015 12:39 am

I... think I've been playing at 120 fps.

That would explain why my guys keel over within half a second of entering the sight line of anything tougher than a Scout.

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Re: World War Moink

Postby Grath » Sun Feb 22, 2015 12:44 am

Mongrel wrote:EDIT: Oh right, you can't disable automatic updates (except by forcing the issue by either copying the entire game to another folder or making the game folder read-only). I had forgotten Steam's seamy underbelly.

Right click -> Properties -> Updates tab -> Only update when launched, then only launch it from offline mode?

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Re: World War Moink

Postby Mongrel » Sun Feb 22, 2015 1:20 am

Doesn't work. Steam still updates it.

Weirdly, I didn't notice a patch download today ┐('~`; )┌

Haven't played much lately, so I loaded up today to progress a little bit through my "A rank the campaign/get all teched out with top-tier royal weapons" quest. I did try the fifth hard mode skirmish a while back (Upper Fouzen) and haha holy shit that deployment!
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Re: World War Moink

Postby Mothra » Mon Apr 06, 2015 1:12 pm

So, forgot to post in here when it happened, but I BEAT THIS. Last mission destroyed me for like ten tries until I realized I didn't need to hit every shock tower with a tank shell - any bullet would do.

After I figured that out... two turns. Jane lit him on fire, laughing. I'll post screens when I get back on my desktop.

Also: I made a thread on the Valkyria Chronicles reddit. I expect you all to post your responses.

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Re: World War Moink

Postby Mongrel » Mon Apr 06, 2015 7:38 pm

Dat thread is uh... >___>

I should play some of this sometime. I got up to 2/3rds of the second playthrough and wandered off to play other games. I'll get back to it for sure - I want to try the second and third games, but want to finish the New Game+ and hard/expert skirmishes run first. Also there are two secret missions in the DLC I never unlocked (I think they're both in the Selvaria campaign? The first one is if you kill Damon and get an A on the Fortress interior, and I forget how you get the second one).
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Re: World War Moink

Postby Mothra » Mon Apr 06, 2015 10:00 pm

I finished Eddy Detachment after the campaign, which was cute, I thought. Mission was decently challenging.

The Selvaria mission I got like halfway through, then all my guys got decimated. I kinda dug how your troops are as shitty as the enemies were in the main game.

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Re: World War Moink

Postby Thad » Thu Apr 30, 2015 1:06 am

Welp, I went ahead and bought VC2. I wouldn't be surprised if it showed up on Steam sooner or later, but what the hell. (You can still buy it new; the price is still around $40 and I don't expect it's ever going to get any lower. Indeed, I rather expect that a shrinkwrapped copy will be worth a lot more than that in a couple of years.)

So far I've just played through the first couple tutorial battles (which are rather a lot like the first couple tutorial battles in the first game, except significantly lower-stakes, which is odd considering there's a damn civil war on). And I've only played on PPSSPP on the ol' 51" plasma; haven't tried on my actual PSP hardware yet.

But it looks surprisingly good in PPSSPP. Like you'd expect, the 3D graphics look a lot better scaled-up than the 2D ones, but the 2D ones still look decent and do a good job keeping the distinctive look of the previous game. There's even less animation in the cutscenes, and not all of them are fully-voiced.

There are, of course, necessary changes to the controls, given that it's designed for a system with only two shoulder buttons and no right stick. You can get around some of the changes by remapping buttons, but not others.

Pretty close to the first game upfront, but there are a couple of noticeable changes, like only engineers can use ragnaid now. (Or at least scouts and shocktroopers can't; those are the only three classes I've had access to so far.)

Music sounds great; a little downsampled but definitely recognizable.

Not much else to report yet; it's still early.

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Re: World War Moink

Postby nosimpleway » Thu Apr 30, 2015 9:23 am

The gameplay in VC2 is fun, the maps being broken up into parts with several individual checkpoints to move between them makes things a little different from the first game.

But oh lordy, some of the story beats are just pants-on-head stupid. When a friend and I were playing through together, I pointed out that as we neared endgame Cosette was about due for her own personal backstory to get resolved, figured the chapter we were about to play was the one it'd happen in, and guessed the dumbest, most cliched possible manner in which it could happen.

I was 100% correct.

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Re: World War Moink

Postby Mothra » Thu Apr 30, 2015 10:51 am

Avan's fucking laugh will haunt me for the rest of my life.

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Re: World War Moink

Postby Thad » Thu Apr 30, 2015 12:34 pm

nosimpleway wrote:The gameplay in VC2 is fun, the maps being broken up into parts with several individual checkpoints to move between them makes things a little different from the first game.


Yeah, that threw me a bit; when I first saw that tutorial map I figured hey, I can take this in one turn. And then wondered why the mission wasn't complete when I captured the flag.

Clearly it's meant to accommodate the PSP's screen size (and there are probably field-of-vision considerations too). But it's an interesting mechanic.

It's also a pretty immediate change from how calling reserves was handled in the first game, in that they appear immediately and take initiative, instead of spawning a turn later. Obviously this completely changes the "Aw hell, they're getting close to my unguarded flag; I better spawn somebody and hope they show up in time" strategizing from the first game.

Also I noticed that there's no permadeath in this one. Which is only fair considering you can't save in the middle of a battle anymore. (Well, not without an emulator and save states, anyway.) Which leads me to wonder about the length of the battles. On the one hand, 45-minute battles are totally inappropriate for a portable system; on the other, that didn't stop them from porting Final Fantasy Tactics. (I forget, did the PSP version let you quicksave in the middle of a battle? I'm pretty sure you could in Tactics Ogre. ...I really should finish Tactics Ogre one of these days.)

nosimpleway wrote:But oh lordy, some of the story beats are just pants-on-head stupid.


Yeah, I'm already getting that vibe just from the beginning of the game -- as I said, they've got a really solid hook here (some factions of the population are less pleased than others with Cordelia's revelation at the end of the last game and now Gallia is in a civil war) but they sure haven't done anything dramatic with it yet. The game opens with a soldier arriving at Avan's door to tell him his brother's dead, which you'd think would get some kind of reaction from him other than "Nuh-uh!" but...no such luck.

Most of the VA's haven't impressed me so far. It's nice to have DiMaggio back, but a little odd to introduce him playing a returning character who he didn't voice in the first game.

On the whole it just feels a lot sillier and more inconsequential than the first game, so far. The first game was plenty silly, and never threw out a plot twist without telegraphing it two hours in advance, but at least it was a war story. This feels like high school.

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Re: World War Moink

Postby Mongrel » Thu Apr 30, 2015 1:54 pm

Thad wrote:This feels like high school.


This comment is near universal when I hear people talking about VC2's "plot".
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