I’m certainly not going to be playing it with a controller any time soon, but I love the idea of people being able to play the way they want and exposing the game to a much larger audience.

Aren’t those two the same thing? At least in C-style arrays, which might not be how they’re handled under the hood, but is at least how most languages present it to the programmer.

You are, as it were, on the money.

Steve Cannane: Now, I’m not sure what Bill Shorten was relying on for those figures. He’s never actually told us what the evidence is that suddenly that industry would all fall apart.

lol, lmao even

Yeah for real. I really wish this weren’t only available in audio form, because he absolutely wrecked them with that one. More people need to be able to see this to call Labor to account.

It’s 15 minutes.

Connections
Puzzle #466
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It’s pretty gross and unfair that some players had early access to AoM Retold months in advance while other pros didn’t, but that the players with extra access are still allowed to compete in the Red Bull Wololo tournament qualifiers. Either they should have made it available to anyone in the top ~50 of any RTS game who wanted to join, or they should have excluded members of the Players’ Council who had early access from being eligible. He knows he never would have gotten close to qualifying even if it was an even playing field thanks to their years of experience in the old game, but the fact that it wasn’t even was a big morale dampener.

He really thinks the counter system is cool with a lot of depth, but it’s very difficult to intuit with for example some small melee units not being countered by ranged units like they would be in aoe4. It takes a lot more learning rather than being able to intuit.

The Wololo map & civ drafting system was really good.

Seeding the qualifiers based on ladder Elo, with the exception of the top 4 who got directly seeded and were able to practise strategies in private without needing to worry about ladder was “weird”.

God powers shouldn’t be usable straight away upon age-up, to allow opponent time to see what you aged up with and have time to react to it. He says a “top-3 player” agreed with him about this in his chat, and also points to how in aoe4 you can get counterplay by scouting which landmark they’re building, while in aom there’s no way to see they’re aging up or which god they’re going through.

The uniqueness of myth units is one of his favourite things about the game, with their different special abilities.

Some of the human unit counters are awkward, like Poseidon mirrors don’t have a viable option of anti-cav as hoplites aren’t good enough, so both players have to go into full cavalry. He contrasts that to an Odin–Loki matchup where Odin goes raiding cav and Loki can build hirdmen.

Water is weird. He likes the lack of demos, but finds the strength of water myth units too much. And the impact of water on eco is awkward too, since giving up on water after a short battle to go 2 TC can often put you ahead in eco over a player who committed fully to water and won there. But he’s not yet sure if that’s bad or something you have to get used to.

Doesn’t like the lack of trash units, especially for how it affects lower league players.

He loves titans and their ability to help close out a game without being viable as an end in their own right.

He points out the huge swinginess of some god powers like Fimblewinter in team games.

A long section about autoqueue and general RTS theory of multitasking and splitting attention. I actually think he may have finally convinced me over to his side on this point.

AoE3 exists too btw

He’s not yet sure whether he’ll be returning to AoE4 full time or going heavier into AoM, and is taking a break from playing seriously to think about it.

Personally I think amending the false start rule is a good idea. It’s been known for a while that the .1s reaction time is arbitrary and not based on solid evidence. It should be reduced, but not fully eliminated.

The long jump and pole vault changes are terrible ideas. The strategy of avoiding faults or of not over-exerting yourself is part of the event. Plus, this would create a significant additional barrier to organising events, and would split amateur and professional events down to a fundamental level because you just don’t have access to the equipment to adjudicate those rules at an amateur level.

A shorter, faster steeplechase could be cool.

Being creative with the footage is cool I guess. But I’d primarily like to see it used in replays and highlight reels, rather than during the live broadcast, which I’d rather be focused on clearly demonstrating what’s going on.

This is what really shits me. “Oh, the sports companies won’t be able to fund themselves.” If that’s true, too fucking bad. Our laws shouldn’t exist to arbitrarily prop up certain industries even when we’ve decided that the industry is causing harm.

But also, it’s just fucking not true. You can make an argument and say “oh but gambling companies fund 60% of the sport league” or whatever number it is, and pretend that banning gambling would cut the NRL’s budget by 60%. But that’s just not how it works. They’re sponsors because they were the highest bidder, not the only bidder. You’d just go to the next highest bidder if gambling sponsorships weren’t allowed. In the short term, maybe a 10% loss of revenue at most. Realistically, in the long term, it’d be negligible.

Same goes for pokies at local pubs and clubs. Australia has 0.3% of the world’s population and 18% of the world’s poker machines. And if you look specifically at poker machines not located in casinos it goes up to a ridiculous 76%. The entire rest of the world doesn’t allow poker machines at local clubs like we do, and their venues do just fine. The cries that venues would die off if they couldn’t have pokies are just nonsense.

They’d have very little chance in a copyright suit and they know it. Because you can’t copyright game mechanics or general concepts, and those are the things Palworld pretty obviously copies.