ICYCALM'S NOTES FOR LIFE IS FEUDAL: MMO BEST GAME OF ALL TIME ESSAY

sergei's first battle. broke ranks, fell off my horse, got chased in a hedge, killed. back to your domain which could be half an hour ride. even if you had a second horse and gear, chances are by the time you get back to the battlefield, the battle will be over. ergo, even though it has respawns, the rest of the mechanics (massive land, house you must build and defend for respawn) make it so that, moment to moment, the game plays as if there's no respawn. in planetside you had the mobile van. in rust you had the sleeping bags that you could put around the enemy base, even multiple of them. none of that exists here. at most you could build more houses around the military outpost laying siege, but then you would have to give up the spawn in your domain, and the enemies would see a giant house they need to take down instead of searching in the bushes for sleeping bags or for a mobile van.

sieges are relentless. ultimately you can harass the enemies so much they quit the game. but you can also negotiate when they have reached the breaking point and become slaves or vassals or taxable subjects, or even allies. you can't do that IN ANY OTHER STRATEGY GAME because there's no point in it if the game will finish in 2 hours, or even in 40 hours. 40 hours is nothing, by the time you've made an alliance you will have to break it half an hour later, so what's the point? it doesn't feel like a real alliance so the players don't behave like real allies. here it's like a real war. the other people do not become your color and you continue as normal as in the typical stupid strategy game. when the turks conquered greece, the greeks did not become turks. and they overthrew them eventually. that's how lif works. you think they are your vassals now, but they are human beings harboring ambitions and resentments, and when you are in trouble buddy you best believe they will revolt and join your opponents, ergo you have to massage their ego carefully and cultivate friendship over the long term if you don't want to be fucked later. please show me A SINGLE other game where this is true! where there is even A FRACTION of the psychological depth I am describing here!

every player you meet you have to decide, do i try to make them slaves, vassals, allies? tremendous difference in the interaction depending on what you choose, and enormous mechanical ramifications that may lead you to dominate a region or be wiped out and lose months of play. show me another game where this is true!

And of course, a fourth option is to get them to join your guild, or you join theirs, which latter opens up the entire wonderful world of betrayal mechanics from Rust, only here the prize is orders of magnitude larger because the work put into what you will betray is that much larger too. And interesting that the most POSITIVE option to treat other players is precisely the backdoor through which to unleash on them the most NEGATIVE consequences. Imagine one of those giant cities people build, that takes 15 minutes to walk or even ride across them. Imagine a player opening a back door--or even demolishing a back wall--during Judgement Hour. No game has ever given more to the player to lose, and therefore in no other game does betrayal achieve more, and feels worse when it's inflicted on you, than in this game.

how deep the psychology runs. you think slave is just a title. but who would take you seriously when discussing politics if you have this title? everyone immediately knows you are weak and have no honor. how would you be a good ally to them in this merciless world if you allow yourself to be enslaved? every word that comes out of your mouth while you have slave in your title is instantly discounted by everyone. so a "mere" title becomes a deep game mechanic. you want to avoid it like the plague but other guilds want slaves for mechanical purposes and will try to impose this status on as many players as they can, especially large guilds with dozens of outposts that need hundreds of slaves. and since you can't enslave npcs... they are trying to enslave half the population. As in reality lol. Ergo life in lif is indeed feudal.

why the battles are so chaotic. because real battles are chaotic lol. first explain how they feel. then explain that it's because there are no AIs with no concern for their lives lining up to be killed as in stupid games and stupid movies. also death is a big setback here and spawning mechanics are rough. no teleporting around the map either, very special teleporting mechanics that make it next to useless except to facilitate you meeting your friends at the start (and even then, only with your later friends not the initial ones, the initial ones have to walk for hours, which is a terrific mechanic as it opens up the world slowly leaving wild areas for latecomers or for extremely determined players will to walk five hours on firing up the game)

infernovia whining that battles don't have thousands of players. funny because most medieval battles were small scale, it was not the age of empires, it was the age of feudal lords most of whom could only field hundreds of warriors and some of them merely dozens. of course, I love huge battles too, and this genre, and perhaps even this game, will give them to us one day, but I am not gonna sacrifice first-person 4X in order to play in some dumb scripted tactical game where the game lasts 1 hour as opposed to 1 year lol and where you don't create or achieve anything, let alone a stupid single-player game like the ones he prefers

infernovia's review sounds like a review a slave would write
For reals
He says he hates feudal life
He has a whole paragraph about that
Do you think the barons and kings hated feudal life?
infernovia played like a slave, like a stupid peasant, running around half naked trying to defeat 5000 players like an insane person, and the game made him eat dirt for it. it gave him exactly what he was asking for, and his response was the typical low-IQ person response: hating life and the world for it
This game is genius. it gives you exactly what life gives you: what you put into it. you put nothing and you get nothing. ergo the Overwhelmingly Negative reviews on Steam (see also my quality/popularity essay that explains thoroughly how this works and how the very BEST games MUST have overwhelmingly negative response). who reads proust? almost no one. who REALLY listens to Mozart? almost no one. and the same is true of LiF. the common man's response to the peaks of art MUST be "Overwhelmingly Negative" (which LiF used to be for years after release, it's only recently that it has "risen" to Mixed rating lol, now that we've shed most of the rabble)

A view of our three fiefs
It's intoxicating
I am in a first-person game looking at my 4X squares in first-person
It's like being able to zoom into a Civ map and walk around
Even better, I CAN'T zoom out lol
Both pics are wrong
The first is of the trade outpost not the herbalist (though the herbalist has indeed stopped burning) and the second is of two fiefs, not three. You can't take a pic of all three fiefs because there is a fief we don't own between them
Merely surveying your domains is a game mechanic
In the endgame all that recoil will be doing is riding around trying to direct our fortifications and looking for weak spots in the enemies'

Sound design. Chickens, swamp, wind, crickets, birds, animals of all kinds. it sound more real than outside my door. and those haunting folk melodies over everything... aural bliss, to match the pastoral hills and snow-capped alpine peaks... while the car soccer expert says it's "drab". It is HE who is drab, and he is merely projecting his drabness onto the greatest videogame ever made.

If harvest falls during Judgement Hour enemies can take it
It'll be like a movie where the peasants are trying to gather their stuff and get in the castle before the enemy troops arrive
And large guilds have 15 hours of JH every week..., almost every day

Unlike Rust and all other such games ever, the rules promote realistic-looking towns and fortresses, just as they promote realistic human behavior. that's how you achieve ARTISTIC simulation, as opposed to The Sims, which is just boring.

guild primary secondary and tertiary time zones. it's up to the attackers to meet your demands like in a court of justice. genius

How the game opens up. Warehouse outposts provinces regions taxes other guilds clergy. Each step takes a hundred hours or more and opens up new vistas. that's why only a handful of players with thousands of hours have a grasp of the full complexity, while morons who play ten hours understand nothing. Put a screenshot of a warehouse. You have to make even the nails

Ciarog's comment that in this game real life is just another meter. So I want to keep playing but I am hungry and tired, so I have to manage those meters to keep playing. This is the real survival aspect.

First-person 4X
(and yes I know it's third-person but there's a first-person view too)
put pic of me standing at crossroads here

and yes, I know most people play it in third-person, but there's a first-person mode too that is preferred in certain circumstances. The reason the game is mostly played in third-person is the same reason For Honor is third-person, because in older eras combat was mostly melee, and you can't do melee properly in videogames in first-person until you get very advanced VR, perhaps to brain-jacking levels, because a 2D screen makes you lack awareness of your immediate surroundings, which is where melee takes place. If you have 3 screens it's better, but still not enough. 4X games in modern era would be played mostly in first-person, so a 4X game like LiF that had all eras would start third-person and would gradually become more and more first-person after the invention of gunpower

explain how the overwhelmingly negative score cleared out the rabble and made the servers more playable and the game more immersive because of the more realistic spacing of domains and towns and castles. and when the playerbase fell further, and all the servers had to be joined into one, we got the massive Godenland which dwarfed the original map and was even better made. Every step that the rabble took away from the game ended up improving the game lol, until the quality of players left was so superior that, finally, the score rose to Mixed lol. I never experienced the launch that must have been servers filled to the brim with mostly retards

infernovia hates the game and gives bullshit reasons. An honest and self-conscious review would have explained that he doesn't like to be in large teams, that he doesn't like total freedom of action because he doesn't know what to do with it and it makes him uneasy and feeling lost, that he prefers narrower horizons and simpler rules and goals, and either stupid AI enemies he can utterly conquer with a little trial and error, or at most limited multiplayer with a handful of players that he stands a chance to completely dominate now and then
And with these standards, yes, LiF is a bad game lol, so he isn't ultimately wrong in what he's saying. For lower lifeforms, this game is the plague, just like chess is for dogs for example

CULT|ChevRageToday at 3:55 PM
Heads up that after respawning you basically have to wait 10 minutes to not be crippled with regards to stamina.
CULT|recoilToday at 3:56 PM
30 building logs for the plaster house, 100 for wooden lol
CULT|icycalmToday at 3:56 PM
Heads up that after respawning you basically have to wait 10 minutes to not be crippled with regards to stamina
Damn that's such a fine rule
CULT|recoilToday at 3:57 PM
It places importance on healers
CULT|CiarógToday at 3:57 PM
60 piety and you can pray away that debuff.
CULT|icycalmToday at 3:57 PM
Simultaneouly manages to get you back in the game, so you're not frustrated that you can't play, but crippling you so that you can't mindlessly flood the battle Overwatch and Battlefield style
CULT|ChevRageToday at 3:58 PM
60 piety and you can pray away that debuff.
That's a hard skill to raise, especially since it's so tough getting the exp for that particular tab.
CULT|icycalmToday at 3:58 PM
bobik has thought of everything, except teaching players his game
CULT|ChevRageToday at 3:58 PM
lol
CULT|recoilToday at 3:58 PM
I bet there's a long cool down for that debuff prayer
CULT|ChevRageToday at 3:58 PM
I think it's like 2 mins
If I remember correctly
So you can't just pat everybody on the back, you have to know who the important dudes are, and have to be ready in advance.

For you a strategy game is one which the player starts with a small patch of dirt and conquers the universe. But how would GoT, or ANY work of fiction, fare like that? Wouldn't it be the most ridiculous, the most boring fiction ever? Even in a game, past the 50% conquest of the world, depression approaches, and by 60% or 70% has fully set in. Ask ANY serious strategy player. I don't even finish the game if I get to that level. I either restart it, if I feel there's still things I haven't seen or done in the game, or more usually I simply quit it and look for another game, above all a bigger more complex game that I WON'T be able to dominate, and of course ideally one I simply CAN'T dominate for the simple reason of its sheer scale, complexity and scope. And hey, one fine day LiF said sup lol, and I was in love, and still am, and will continue to be until something even larger and crazier and more complex and more inhumanly difficult is released, because the goal of WORLD DOMINATION is and SHOULD be inhumanly difficult. It's even retarded, if you actually allow the player to achieve it. Didn't I just say it depresses him? Not the good depression, but the bad, the boring, the lame, the shallow depression. Your favorite games are SHALLOW, you get me? and I am sick and tired of seeing endless clones of them year after year and decade after decade, and I rejoice when a single game comes out once a decade or half-decade that bucks that trend, as LiF brilliantly does, and Rust did before it.
You want "clean" diplomacy, "clean" politics. You don't want to have to deal with 5000 people. You prefer 7 AIs with half a dozen clean-cut dialogue options (most of which, btw, have jack shit effect on the game fyi). But real strategy is messy, like the psychology that powers it. But you don't want psychology either; what does psychology have to do with strategy, you think in your drooling little mind? Just because you can't and therefore don't want to deal with it doesn't mean it's not the best that exists. Indeed the fact you and almost everyone else can't deal with it is a pretty good sign that it's the best--for those who CAN deal with it, and therefore want to.

This is the forestersinRussia Guild
They look harmless lol
CULT|icycalmToday at 6:54 PM
2 huts
I see slavery in their future
CULT|ChevRageToday at 6:54 PM
lol
unless they are protected by a powerful lord
real life simulation, now you understand the past and medieval times

The fastest way to learn a profession is to watch someone stream it
I am watching recoil now and I see all his forging mechanics I've never seen before
Each profession has extremely customized mechanics. bobik hasn't just reskinned the same tasks into 7 professions, he has sat down for ages to design unique procedures for each one
Even the way the various workbenches operate is unique, the menus are unique
Rust has only like 5 workbenches, and 3 of them work identically

See how LiF's strategy layer solves Rust's no. 1 problem? We have never lasted in Rust more than 4 days or so. Our enthusiasm is always dead by that point, while in LiF we've been playing a full week and we're now even more excited than at the start lol.
I estimate we've put in 500-600 man-hours into the game in a week, and that's without at least a couple of people who would have played if they had the time
We've never put anywhere near as much time into a Rust wipe as this, or in any other game for that matter
Rust with a strategy layer would be insane
Proper action combat, teching up to helicopters...
It even already has boats and scuba diving...
And unlike LiF they are adding stuff every month
Alarms, CCTV, computers, the modular vehicles that are coming
What a damn shame that game is
Well we have Atlas and Starbase to look forward to
Last Oasis too I hear has thousands of players, persistence, and territory control. Clans control oases of various sizes. Might be worth checking out.
HOW LIF ADDS ROLE-PLAYING TO THE FIRST-PERSON 4X formula. me and recoil acting like leader and advisor. talking to all the clans. half the game is talking. nowhere near as much role-playing in Rust. They have bs role-playing servers, and that's it.
Past a certain level of complexity you need all your attention to play the game. At that point, the game is your life. You sleep for 8 hours, and the rest of the day you "play" the game. And that's when you've reached the matrix.

CULT|icycalmToday at 10:29 AM
Come on guys, world domination is just a few carrots away
I know we can do it
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single carrot
CULT|AgentxToday at 9:58 AM
I'll have jewelery 0 soon too, though I don't have the tools
To understand the level of complexity we're talking about it's better to say that LiF doesn't have A tech tree but trather SEVEN intertwined tech trees. And only one character can master each of them. But they can't master them without the products of the other six tech trees, so you have co-op teching here: 7 trees that must march in lock-step for maximum efficiency. It's unprecedented.
CULT|ChevRageToday at 10:03 AM
Yeah it's pretty awesome
CULT|icycalmToday at 10:03 AM
See Agent has Jewelery but he needs tools from recoil to actually do it
And not level 1 tools, but tools after recoil has leveled
But in order for recoil to make the tools he needs ore from Agent
CULT|AgentxToday at 10:04 AM
Yep.  By myself I'd have to try to buy or trade it off someone else
CULT|icycalmToday at 10:04 AM
And at some point they all need some kind of plants
The farming gets into EVERYTHING
You want a castle, I hear?
You'll need flux seeds for that
And the fighting teching is a WHOLE other 7 trees lol
And then you have the standalone skills on top of that
CULT|ChevRageToday at 10:06 AM
I gotta log on now real quick and check some stuff
CULT|icycalmToday at 10:06 AM
We haven't even GLIMPSED the tactics in terms of what mix of war specialties to make
Does anyone know how many footmen per horsemen per archer is a good mix?
We'll find out about 1000 hours in I think
CULT|icycalmToday at 10:06 AM
We haven't even GLIMPSED the tactics in terms of what mix of war specialties to make
Does anyone know how many footmen per horsemen per archer is a good mix?
We'll find out about 1000 hours in I think
Civ abstracts the teching to the point that say "metallurgy" is a single "science" advance
It doesn't account for the fact that science and engineering are two separate things manned by separate people
and that if you advance in science but stay behind in engineering, the equations the scientists find are useless
LiF is the first game I know that simulates this
The Romans for example were great engineers but crap scientists
Great at war too

CULT|icycalmToday at 9:42 AM
LiF doesn't need NPCs IF you have a guild of 50 or 100 people
Now we have maybe 12-15 people on the game, but only about 7-8 play regularly, which means that usually we have 2-4 people on
But if our guild was 100 people--as some guilds in the game have--we would have 20 people on regularly, and 50 or so during peak times
That would flood even a big castle with people everywhere
And that's how this game was designed to play. It was designed for 10,000 players in the SMALL map, the one before Godenland
Godenland is 3-4x bigger
So it could hold 30,000-40,000 players
If it had that many, it would feel like real Game of Thrones
But people are lame like infernovia and have bad taste
Ergo we only have I would estimate 5000 players
CULT|ChevRageToday at 9:45 AM
I really hope I wont need something unobtainable in the short term like hay in order to tame horses
CULT|icycalmToday at 9:46 AM
Yeah it's a possibility
Someone should map out a whole tech tree at some point
That's how you find the perfect build order
I think the tree here would be MUCH more complex than Civ's or Rust's
It doesn't seem impressive at first because instead of like nuclear engineering and explosives it has stuff like flux farming
And that's why lame people like infernovia dismiss it
CULT|AgentxToday at 9:49 AM
I would like to get to a point where we can build and fire the siege weapons.  I think that'll be pretty great.
CULT|icycalmToday at 9:50 AM
You are playing with big stakes then
The downside is you could lose everything
On the other hand, by that point, you would have 10-15 fully leveled characters
Plus the players would know the tech tree and a good build order
So you could rebuild elsewhere in a fraction of the time
I think with fully leveled characters and knowledge of the game, the building would take maybe 20% of the time
No walking at all, since everyone can have horses from the start for example

sword master i met in Tenerife. "this is the european martial art" he told me. giant fucking swords that weigh more than some people. enough armor for a tank. tiny asian guys with bamboo armor would be cut in half. we didn't need guns to beat them, our knights would have simply ran them over. I should have joined that guy's school. I will as soon as this damn Chinese plague is over

our simping to the other clan leader, and sissy dissing after. the game made me act like a pussy. the power differential was so enormous, he could feel it, I could feel it, everyone could feel it. the game brings you into situations where you finally understand history. where you finally FEEL it (because I could understand it before, but not feel the weight of power and necessity crushing me as this game crushes you again and again). liberals would do well to play this game. but of course they are weak, and they wouldn't last more than an hour any more than infernovia lasted

yes the combat. It's Russian jank, we know. (link to my "in defense of russian jank essay")

the game takes too much time for you. you don't like a 9-hour opera. You have never sat through one, and you never will. I get it. You can listen to a 5-minute pop song instead then. That's who those songs are written for: people like you. Operas aren't for everyone any more than first-person grand strategy is.

you even pretty much choose your judgement hour, and it makes sense: it is incumbent upon the aggressors to meet the defendant's time since the latter has much more to lose--their entire ability to play the game almost--compared to what the attacker has to gain--some loot and influence over the world. It is an ingenious system that hand't occurred to me before I saw it. No idea if it's cribbed from an earlier game, or inspired from an earlier and more primitive application of it: all I know it's extremely innovative in this genre, and almost solves it's number 2 problem. And I've already said that it ENTIRELY solved its number 1 problem: the lacking endgame.

the average person, and even the vast majority of above-average ones, can't stand this game. They can't even bear to spend a few minutes in it. I think most players fell uncomfortable a mere 20 or 30 minutes in. If you take them by the hand and show them right away how the terraforming and crafting works, it could even be sooner, as opposed to them wandering around aimlessly for a while and at least enjoying the exploration. Which even that doesn't last long when they realize they need to walk a couple of REAL-LIFE HOURS merely to meet up with their friends. But that's what makes horses valuable, compared to the Warzone map that has utterly useless cars and helicopters when you can jog from the one end of the map to the other in 10 minutes (while with the vehicles it's five, and the helicopter it's two).
you come to me to hear what I think is the best stuff. Isn't it quite cool that there is an artwork that reqioes whole WEEKS and MONTHS of your life to properly appreciate? We tend to think that too much videogames is sad--and in many instances, perhaps even in most, this is true--but at the same time there are exceptions to every rule, so why not to this one too? Merely as an idea, as a concept, if you were an art lover and discussing art with another art lover, and if some artist or critic or theorist intimated to you that, "There is a secret artwork that you can get lost in for MONTHS, and it can only be appreciated by those who do so". I dare say that every single art lover would be intrigued, if not entranced. I know Nietzsche would be. Set aside your dislike for the genre for a moment, and you will see that there is nothing wrong, as a concept, with the idea of an artwork that requires days or weeks or even months. And while staring at a painting for months would indeed be mental disorder (we call them vegetables), it's a whole other story if the painting is moving and you can jump inside it. Even more if the painting does not merely depict a static scene but an entire world that lives and breathes and in which anything is possible--as it has never been in any game before LiF (for in Street Fighter, for example, almost NOTHING is possible).
proof is in the pudding: our longest stream was Rust my 14 hour stream up until THE VERY DAY that we discovered how the LiF strategy layer works. And in that day I streamed for 13 hours, recoil broke my record, and the next day I streamed for another 12.5 hours. Most immersive game ever. I did not PLAN the streams to prove my point; the streams occurred naturally, and afterwards I realized that they are a mere reflection of the forces at work that I am analyzing.
I have news for you. The peasants didn't have time for opera either. The nobles went to them. Well believe it or not, the modern nobility plays this game and this sort of games while the ADHD masses give it Overwhelmingly Negative. They don't just dislike it, they fucking HATE it. Why are you not a lord in real life? Because you lack the qualities and focus to even be one in a game lol. You lack the patience, perseverance, the vision to SEE the strategy layer--for the average gamer who jumps into this game the strategy layer DOESN'T EXIST AT ALL. EVEn if you show it to him it doesn't exist for him, just like, outside the game, all the higher possibilities of all life don't exist for him because he lacks the mental capacity to imagine it. His life is linear not because he has been cheated out of "open-world" life, but because he PREFERS linearity. And of course, if he prefers it in his life he will prefer it in games too. The other way it doesn't work: there are people who prefer open world games but linear life, but there are no people who prefer open
Terraforming allows for insane stuff. They dug a hill and jumped over our palisade. An archer guarding the diggers. Castles built into sheer cliffs, moats. It's insane. Tunnels leading under castles.
"I don't have time". And an opera cycle is 9 hours. I am sure you don't have time for that either. And that artform is centuries old; shouldn't we have an art now that lasts 20 hours? Or 50 or 100 or 1000 for that matter. Isn't that what immersion is all about? How can you be immersed in a 3-minute game? Yes it's fun, and so are a lot of other things, but that's not what people like me who built this artform and backed it for decades where imagining when we looked at the early mags. That's not what drew us in.

in rust people scream like morons, even worse in say ftg tps where people call everyone "fag" or "nigger". Why do the players in those other genres behave so childishly while LiF players so maturely? It's an astonishing realization: because LiF's mechanics are so mature while the other games' are so childish. To play LiF you have to be a man. The requirements are awe-inspiringly steep. Consider this. Minecraft players like to build but not die. PVP players like to die but not build. So, at first sight, you need the extremely rare breed of player who likes BOTH to build AND to die. But even that's not enough. Those players play Rust. There is a third requirement to play LiF. Strategy. You need the absurdly rary rara avis of a player who likes to build AND to die AND to strategize. No wonder such people will be more mature than the average dickweed who plays the lower genres, and ONLY plays them. And if all that was not enough, the game even FORCES you to be mature, and not even in the hamfisted way that an Overwatch or a Fallout 76 "toxic" players (link my toxicity essay), by simply banning "bad behavior" (and at the same time fun behavior, because they are sisters and even twins)--that's how you treat a child. It's too young and dumb to know better so you DICTATE its behavior: you flat out order it precisely how to behave and what it can and can't say. But adults are different, and it is the first-person 4X genre of Rust that treats players like adults, and LiF even more. Quote Rust developer on player behavior. In Rust they act immaturely because the world is not complete, the lack of strategy layer is the lack of completenes. The lack of persistence is the lack of completeness. Strategy is the ultimate CONSEQUENCES of your actions, and if your actions have little consequences you can be a dick all you want. but by the sheer complexity and nuance of its design. Or be immature and get your stuff wiped out, and quit the game. One way or another the game mercillesly weeds out everyone who lacks the sheer capacities, temperament and maturity to survive in this world.
Kipling: "watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools"

"Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing." Robert E. Howard's Conan

In EU and the Paradox games there's no eXploration: the map is already revealed. There's no eXploitation either: you don't build anything. In Civ you lay down every piece of road tile by tile by hand. That's what we mean by eXploitation. If you take this away, you don't have a 4X game anymore, you have a normal strategy game, what we had before Civ in 1991. And now along comes LiF, where you have to dig up the very dirt or clay or stone to make the road with a pickaxe and hammer it in with a hammer, ALL THE WHILE dealing with politics involving THOUSANDS of people, as opposed to at best the eight that Civ gives you. You want strategy? This is strategy; Civ is for children in comparison (and Paradox is for slow children). You are telling me LiF is a "survival" game, and it's not strategy, when it's the very APEX of strategy? You have no idea what you're saying because you're dumb, just like you dumbly accepted that Europa Universalis is a 4X game because you've never played a real 4X game and would be too dumb to understand what it is and what it does even if you had.
the game takes too long you say. buddy that's what we want. By we I mean hardcore gamers. That's what we wanted from the very begining: to be immersed into these worlds. The low genres do not allow this. I don't care how much you love Tetris or Pac-Man, no one can play it FOR THREE DAYS STRAIGHT as a friend of mine played Rust. The more complex the game gets, the more it becomes possible to play it more (with the ultimate game of the ultimate complexity played YOUR ENTIRE LIFE NON-STOP). That's why Civ was the best. The "one more turn" syndrome. It was only GTA3 that beat it, and then Rust which is basically Civ+GTA3, only with borked strategy. Well, LiF fixes the strategy so it's no longer borked, and LiF is what Rust WOULD have been, COULD have been if Garry Newman and    were better game designers. Along comes Bobik, takes their game and fixes it.
this is the best strategy game ever. people play Paradox games and think they are 4X whereas they are not even 2X, and of course they ignore this game which is 20X. Think of the "X"s as magnification, as in scopes. The kind of person who prefers the 2X of Paradox or Planetfall to the 4X of Civ, will of course scoff at the idea of playing the 20X of LiF. One X is exploration. In Paradox, zero exploration. You get the whole map revealed in advance. In Civ, 1X exploration. But is the Civ exploration the same as in LiF, where you walk one step at a time in real-time as opposed to hovering over a map where an entire city is a single square? So that's why I say that LiF's exploration is five times Civ's, and the same is true of all the other Xs. And five times 4X is 20X. Check my math. THIS is the ultimate strategy game. Plus you govern people. You govern people in PA too, but here the interaction is on a whole other level because of those 20Xs. Much higher-resolution interaction. Orders of magnitude more psychological complexity involved.

So Rank I guilds have 15 hours of JH per week lol
Btw people build roads connecting their forts, towns and outposts in this game. They even build roads to other people's domains
Eg a road to an ally would take you there 25% faster if you are going to defend them in JH... and then bring you home 25% faster

The tree mechanics blow the fuck out Rust's tree mini game
Everything in the game has quality levels
Slaves and eugenics. This is a Russian game and they dont give a fuck

It's not only that the castles are the largest coolest most realistic seen in a game it's that they are also the grittiest. Tanning beds with fumes rising 24/7 it's the deepest medieval life simulator the lumber hauling and stacking the seeds and planting and seasons it makes medieval engineers look like a cellphone game and yet without using simulator in its title and without being a shit game and artwork as all the sims are. Masterpiece doesn't even begin to cover this game

24/7 streaming. A monitor showing our kingdom all day, and not lame like in all other long term games but with fear every single day or and climax on weekends and not only on weekends if your guild is top it's throughout the week climaxing with the top five or ten guilds which are almost running 24/7 and fighting battles and wars like game of thrones.

Our history with lobo guild. And this is just one of the hundreds of guilds in the world.

Explain how it's not only the diplomacy that is real and really hard work, it's also the internal politics. With a clan of a couple dozen people, as we have now, you can still involve everyone in the decisions. But a clan of a couple dozen people won't go far. They will either be wiped and quit the game eventually, or learn to become loyal subjects to a much larger clan, that will run the politics for them. The smaller clan then will only have smaller politics, internal politics, feudal politics, to play. I.e. Count against Count and Baron or Duke against Baron and Duke. But the large wars will be determined by the sovereigns. So what do you do if you want to play a sovereign in this world? Well... you better figure out how to get at least a couple hundred real people to acquiesce to your commands lol. Insane depth. Nothing like this has ever even been attemped in a game. Only a handful of players are playing this game at the highest level, and seeing everything. Everyone else is a peon, more or less. Once you are in a clan with 200 people, or become vassals to such a clan, the average knight has almost no say at all in politics and just tends to his house, his horses, and his skills and arms... Words fail to describe the greatness of this game... A whole universe away from MMORPGs where everyone is equal since nothing is at stake and the guilds can't even properly interact so there's no reason for the ranks beyond nerdhood. Maybe EVE does this, but EVE isn't first-person, and you can't build anything, or even walk anywhere, as far as I know.--What would be the solution to someone not being able to get 200 people to listen to him, but who still wants to play the sovereign in a game of this scope? Insanely advanced AI. Normally, we say that multiplayer games are harder to code than single-player ones, and normally, this is true. But in this kind of game, it's much easier to add MMO mechanics and let the players populate the world and create all the interactions as opposed to designing extremely complex AI and get it to handle 5000 NPCs when Rust can't even run brainless chickens without stressing current server tech to the breaking point. So yeah, in the FAR future you will be able to play a game like this alone and become king with Mount & Blade mechanics and with a difficulty slider that even someone so weak and stupid and talentless who can't hold down job will be able to accomplish this. But until then, whoever wants this experience will have to deal with human beings.

I can't imagine effeminate anime characters doing the hard labor in this game. I think it would look comical

Even with no strategy games like Civ or eu the goal is still to conquer everything. Certainly with 8-player Civ, but even with 40 player EU it's still a very feasible goal. It doesn't happen always but it happens quite often because 1v40 is not out of the realm of human imagination especially if you ally with a bunch of people in the early and mid game and betray them in the endgame. The scope for diplomacy is orders of magnitude greater in eu than Civ because the number of players is an order of magnitude greater, but the number n lif is TWO orders of magnitude above THAT so LiF diplomacy is practically real life diplomacy and certainly feudal diplomacy and that why the strategy in LiF is practically real life strategy and orders of magnitude greater than in any previous strategy game, since diplomacy is almost all of strategy. Btw I long advocated for mmo Civ. Bigger map more players. Civ is 1000 times better game than eu but it hurts the game that they have rested on their laurels with regards to number of players. The problem is that they still want to allow all players to tech all the way to nukes from cavemen and if they give you a little fief you won't be able to do it. Does Luxembourg have nukes? And neither would a Luxembourg size player in mmo Civ. But I say that's all the better. Let only the best tech up all the way and make teching a reward for good play as opposed to something every single player expects to achieve simply by staying in the game. The game will become that much more pleasurable for that and you can always add a super easy sp mode for those who stand no chance and still want to "see everything" the game has to offer

Negative reviewers haven't played LiF. A single player droppping in the world and trying to build a castle by himself and antagonize entire nations is not LiF, it's mental Illness. It's not that you can't play alone, you can, but you must radically temper your expectations. You can't even finish your own specialty alone because you need the other characters to tech up EVEN IN YOUR OWN SPECIALTY. The complexity is insane. Even in the real world a man can't become a skilled artisan in the middle of a forest, he needs an entire city of people supporting him to do it. So in LiF. You can progress in all the skills but only a little. You can build shacks but you can't learn to build drawbridges and keeps. You will be a peon, just like in reality a hermit in the woods. You don't want to play with other people because you are a hermit in real life, and you will be a hermit in LiF too. If you are okay with that, play lif alone. There are people who report loving it, but you have to be the right sort of person for it. If you are a shut in strategy player dude and expect 4000 people to act like AIs in AoE and eu campaign and allow you to steamroll them one fief and kingdom at a time you are in for a harsh slap in the face my friend, and you'll deserve it. Your negative review is merely a projection for your stupidity at that point and by no means reflects badly on the game. If anything it speaks to the game's greatness that it's demanding enough to weed out utter retards like you, unlike other games that welcome and facilitate your sheer fucking retardation with their retarded rules and designs.Once you've understood how the game works after a couple hundred hours with it you look at the map with new eyes. At first it's just another videogame map. When you walk for two hours to meet your friends and only made it three squares you realize it's a pretty fucking huge map. But it's still dead to you. But once you've spent half a real life day trying to make nails to bang two boards together you begin to look at the dots on the map with different eyes with eagle eyes that can zoom in and see details that you could not even imagine at first. Those clusters of dots 5 hours walk from you? That's three guilds of 40 players total who for the last month have put 1000 man hours into raising three towns and three castles and two dozen outposts and farms down to the beds and the chairs in their homes the cooking pots and the chickens in their coops. That lone dot on the north ice? That's six friends who walked half a real day to be away from everyone and have a seaside town. Those 30 close dots in two colors? That's two kingdoms comprised of half a dozen guilds each totaling a couple hundred players who have been at each other's throats for weeks now running massive sieges every weekend with their borders moving back and forth as they burn each other's outposts to gain access to their monument. There has never been a more alive digital world. Second life is a bunch of lame losers, mmorpgs forget about it. All those are games for subhumans. LiF is what the cool kids play.You will never see everything that's happening in this world. It's too big for that. PoE review about the world feeling wretched. This world feels epic. But though you will never see what everyone is doing. You WILL hear about it, if you play long enough and well enough. First of all there is the guild leaderboard. You will hear of the top houses as in game of thrones. You will probably even end up interacting with at least a few of them. Moreover as you expand you will meet people who will relate to you what's happening further out. Where there are horses, resources, fights, allies and enemies. Some of what they say is true and some false. Some ignorant and some deliberately misleading. Remember these are people not NPCs so the entirety of human psychology is a game mechanic! It's a core game mechanic as vital to the game as crafting and combat. You might say it's not the first but I reject that claim. There is little to no human psychology in mmorpgs because the players essentially do not interact with each other. They only interact with their friends, but then again so they do in gears of war or monster hunter. It's a bullshit shallow interaction because they are not competing between themselves for anything so the deeper human psychology which is all geared at competition has no chance to come out and be used. You are just buddies chewing the fat while shooting dumb NPCs for 20 hours, and that's all. As even when competition arises in vs mp games like Warzone it's bullshit. You drop in for a few minutes shoot some people and drop out. Why would human psychology need to be used in such a scenario? It'd be useless. Same in battlefield. In PlanetSide it comes out a bit more but it's still tiny. In Rust it comes out a LOT more but it's still fairly small because the mid and late games where it would appear because that's when the stakes are high are hobbled by the lack of any grand goal to accomplish so it devolves to people trolling each other. It's true that this trolling is hilarious and matches the game's theme perfectly but it's also true that it's shallow compared to the depth of human beings and we really needed a game where it's deep. And LiF is that game, where nearly the full depth of human psychology is plumbed.You will never conquer the world. It is technically possible but it won't happen, unlike any other strategy game ever which EXPECT you to do it and are even designed in such a way that even the worst player can do it, through difficulty levels. But there are no such levels here: the world is as it is, and the challenge is insurmountable, just like in the real world, or even in fiction. Did anyone conquer Westeros? It would have been a shitty show if someone had. And that's what videogames are which expect you to conquer the world: they are shit videogames, at least compared to LiF. Had to train myself to overcome the whackamole mindset that decades of inferior strategy games have inculcated in me. Don't wipe all your neighbors. The challenge instead is to ASSIMILATE them or failing that to be assimilated by then. Zarathustra: "If you must be a servant, find him whom you can serve best." Yes in this game even bending the knee is difficult, and what other game is assimilation allowed let alone encouraged let alone ESSENTIAL to survival and to seeing more of the game? Forge an alliance with your neighbors. Then who will we fight? There are more players further out dude. 5k players at least. You won't run out of enemies lol, relax. And even in your vicinity, human psychology being what it is, not everyone will join the same alliance. You will have to deal with problematic counts and Kings and it is only after you've dealt with them that the alliance can truly grow and seek a worthy opponent. Like a movie where the leader first "unites the tribes" and only then sets off on the road to conquest and creating an empire. Only this isn't a movie and the 5k players are not following a script meaning an empire might well decide to invade your region while you're still in the middle of your "unite the tribes" phase. It's chaos, like the real world. And maybe then it's game over and either quitting the game or starting from scratch. The stakes are tremendous here and they merely rise more and more as you progress in the game. I have no idea what it must feel like to work for six months only to lose everything over a couple of weeks in the end. I bet there's players who got ptsd from this game.

Playing whackamole with surrounding squares

You micromanage your leveling in a way I've never seen before. Even if it's taken from eve. So what. And the building is taken from rust. It's the synthesis that matters, and it is genius. Trying to do anything simple in this game feels a bit like this lol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbSehcT19u0 The crafting is extremely complex and genius interrelated. Link Malcolm in the middle video and quote Chev. You can't have a castle without flax seeds. It's so absurd to the point of genius. Even if you don't like farming games this game will force you to do it until you like it. It will ram it down your throat. It really opens horizons. You say but I hate farming! And the game replies "you will do it and you'll like it". Diamond obsessing about putting a perfectly useless fence around his farm is proof that this works

Damage modeling Rust has five work stations lif has dozens or the fences walls etc rust has one wall that's why LiF towns look real while rust is one object copy pasted

Every encounter is memorable

Realistic building damage. It's a little like Anno. But then again AoE2 destroying castles with swords is retarded and no one says anything. why? because it's not first-person. if it were first-person, we'd be laughing that the castle came down because some peasants beat it with sticks. but infernovia prefers AoE2 because he lacks imagination

I keep mentioning opera because that's what LiF is: an interactive opera, an interactive game of thrones that serves up unique storyline with every yearly wipe. So you go ahead and watch your TV shows or your novels or comics or whatever, where you merely observe the drama instead of taking part in it, or load up some shallow videogame that serves you up wooden NPCs repeating the same half a dozen badly-written lines while you struggle to suspend disbelief at the sheer obvious fakeness and shallowness of everything. I'll be in Godenland that script 15 hours a day immeresed to such an extent that I'll forget to eat. My character has been eating better than me for a week now. I salivate at the feasts that I feed himThose castles made of rock and granite, as hard as the men who lived in them

Just standing around as a group resplendent in heavy armor while waiting for a meeting is a pleasure. How can waiting be a pleasure? It comes from the extreme depth of simulation and art. Obviously waiting around in super Mario is not pleasureable, it's an annoyance and someone would have to not be all right in the head to do it. But here it's like you are in a movie, one of those parlay scenes where the leaders leave a line of their best knights and meet in the empty center of the battlefield to see if they can resolve their issues without bloodshed. A game that turns waiting into pleasure--if that's not art I don't know what is. But to appreciate this scene. to enjoy it, you have to have put in the time, to be invested in it and its outcome. If you just jump in to try the meeting scene that icy raved about you'll likely feel nothing. You don't care about our domains since you haven't built them stone by stone and fought for them. You might as well watch a movie which only lasts a couple hours since you're a busy man and can't afford more, and it condenses all the background so that you will have at least SOME investment in the scene. Nowhere as much as those of us who have LIVED for weeks if not months, but at least it's something. When we play LiF we are THERE on that hill, horse neighing and banners blowing in the breeze, while you are sitting in your couch and staring at the hero. We are the heroes.

Explain in great detail what the high degree of interactivity of the environment does to the game. The most interactive environment in a game ever. It feels like reality. Like a real place. And a stunning place moreover.

After LiF I see European architecture with new eyes. The detail on it, the sheer weight of it, the richness.

Copy paste my strategy suggestions from Discord of which I took a pictureTheme ark atlas pirates ninjas dinosaurs dragons zombies. Supreme self confidence and vision. Does not throw a couple of spells in to attract the fantasy nerds. Strict historical like Civ. It might seem a disadvantage at first but when you add Civ's tech tree it's the only way it can work. Fantasy utterly kills Civ because it kills the games raison d'etre: scientific evolutionSubtlety and complexity of systems. It takes a very long time to grasp it dozens of hours at the least religion system from merchant prince the herbalist system the Xp plus skills plus attributes. It's better than D&D in some respects. Eg the real location of xp from skill to skill seems artificial and gamey at first but eventually you realize it's very realistic "Even if the Game has some outstanding aspects, most of it is tedious." First off, I reject that out of hand; YOU are tedious, not the game, not even its most mundane, most "tedious" moments. It is your low capacity to appreciate the environment that results in a tedious judgement. Schopenhauer: "Just so the quality of the work varies with the capacity of the mind to understand it". All you are doing is projecting your tediousness into the work. All the "grinding" is there on purpose, it's not grinding at all. The sense of place, high up among alpine peaks stacking logs and placing them while the howling wind and surrounded by the sounds of small animals and my friends going about their tasks as we all work as one to erect the most detailed complex structures ever seen in all of art, and not merely to see them but as a mere prelude to weeks and months of strategy in a scale so grand and a psychology so see the vast majority of the species is physiologically and mentally incapable of parsing let alone appreciating it... sorry, but what you call tedious I call bliss. And I have news for you that you would suck as a ruler. Every half decent genuine male fancies himself he could lead if PLACED in a position of power--as if power was something one could give you lol--is utterly misplaced. To rule is almost entirely to administrate. A king spending half the day in his throne room among an endless procession of matters to adjudicate is far closer to the reality of rule than game of thrones, which to a real ruler would be as much if a joke as Hollywood commandos are to real commandos. Why barons cutting wood? Video games are not reality they are abstraction. To be sure progress is less abstraction (which is why abstract games like Tetris basically suck just as "abstract art" like paint splotches) but nevertheless there will always be some abstraction. The cutting wood etc is abstracting the ruler administering overseeing his projects. A real ruler might drop by for an hour to observe how his new wall is coming along and make commands for changes. Well since the genre is not quite advanced enough for armies npc craftsmen, this overseeing is abstracted by the player hammering stones for an hour and while laying out the wall. Sure armies of NPCs would be better but I think the reason we don't have them yet is partly it hasn't dawned on devs yet and partly server tech is not yet up to it. Rust animals and Conan exiled slaves. Plus slavery is controversial now
Because you see the administration of complex and sprawling projects as tedious that you have no such projects in your life. To appreciate nature music atmosphere beauty. You think the elder scrolls is not revolting.
When you see how laborious it is to build so much as a wretched shack in this game you will come to be no less than awe for the people who be built those sprawling towns and castles. You might think aspire with no life but that couldn't be further from the truth. First of all, even if we put you in an empty server with all the time in the world you would STILL not create anything as majestic and goddamn realistic. Architecture and landscaping degree. It's not like Rust where you have fortify. It would take you dozens of tries-meaning months if not YEARS of your life--to merely COPY someone else's design, and you still screw it let alone devise and implement your own. But even if you had a great plan it would still take several tries meaning several months if not years to executi it well. And now add the fact that all this effort is done at a constant pressure of a sheer scale that exists in no other game with tactical diplomacy grand strategy cooperation with guild members-- the guys who made that stuff are giants. They earned if not my awe the. Certainly my respect and some of them even my awe. It would be an honor to serve them. Your domains are an advertisement knife greffity. Show me your castle and I'll tell you who you are. They are trying to derive pleasure from the moment to moment, with no view to all the rest of the game, like an animal really. This is how animals are, they live for the present and this miss out on all the highest pleasures. While you are cutting that tree and trying to derive all your pleasure from the loading bar, my mind is on the tech tree and the next time and expansion and how to coordinate to do it faster and whether the build order should be wall or outpost depending on what our neighbors are doing and what to do with the neighbors and who will talk to them and ultimately if this thing we are building will still be standing a week or a month later or if our game will be over because we made the next five minutes decision wrong. The guy who jumps in for half an hour and tries to derive all his pleasure from the loading bar ondigging a ditch is playing an entirely different game than me. No wonder he hates it lol, I would hate it too if I was stupid enough to play it, or to jump into the game and think that that's all there was to it. You have to be swept up in the grand politics--this is a STRATEGY game above all-- If you are remotely intrigued by it you should give it a try, if nothing else it'd make a great story for the grandkids. "I once played LiF for 20 minutes"--and that's it that's the punchline. Like I once caught 20 seconds of Chopin in the elevator or I once read the back cover of an astrophysics textbook.

what games do you know that require architecture and psychology? Only life. And this game.
the mechanics are so sublime they pretty much make you WANT to role-play. schaden on the wall with four riders. 3 of them stand back, and one approaches to talk. in any other game they would have mobbed him, like in the stupid MMORPG towns where it's a chaos of freaks and speech bubbles because there are no repercussions, and nothing is at stake. here, the whole of whether those guys will be able to play a week from now might well depend on what impression they give to my friend schadenfreude. so they respectfully keep their distance and only one approaches. and he speaks politely. he doesn't chat about the weather or movies or politics, he doesn't use leet speak. he almost ACTS as if he's in a movie! Of his own free will! This is amgical to observe. I have seen nothing like it in any other game. At most, you might have a "role-playing" server in a game where weirdos role-play for no reason. Here it is a matter of life and death in the game, and of whether you can play the game at all irl. It is incredible.
spreadsheets in space might be cool, i don't know, but this isn't spreadsheets, this is life, and life IS feudal.
every little move contributes to the final result, even aesthetics. build a beautiful town with decorations etc. and people want to contribute to it. you yourself will want to play more
this game with for honor combat and wildlans graphics and map variety? the matrix. Add civ and alpha centauri teching and it's my ubergame, my Armageddon. Might as well go in a cocoon at that point
even if you lose it's not game over. you start over. you keep some skills so it's not too brutal, but it's still brutal. robo felt depressed after losing a week's work in Rust. here players routinely lose MONTHS. and stoop to build them up with broken tools, because they are men and that's what men do. okay you go play Doom or Street Fighter instead. go ahead and feel like a badass while playing games that last 3 minutes and require no brainpower whatsoever. that's what games are designed for. But not this game.
the better animation and fire damage etc. are finishing touches. everything that's needed to play the game, all the systems, are in place now, and have been since the release. if players weren't a bunch of gays the game would not have gotten overwhelmingly negative, more people would be playing it, more money to the developers and we would have had all those finishing touches by now, including many more things including ships and naval building. but that's what the mass does to masterpieces, as it does to geniuses: it responds to them in an "overwhelmingly negative" manner. Their loss, and our gain, because we can do with less whining idiotic children in our arts and studies.

snow is sick, i feel cold when I see it. the wind. the howling of the animals. the dreamy music to accompany your honest labor. haunting music. ever notice how the best games have the best soundtracks? This, pa, rust, mgr. it's endemic
that castle in final fantasy, or even in devil may cry, is just a few polygons and textures. it's a gay castle, so small, so barren, so lacking in interactivity it may as well be an Overwatch stage.
terraforming: the mines. I wanted them in PA. No game that does the mines exist. People have dug through mountains. People have built underwater labyrinths. And this stuff is not MS Paint Minecraft. It's actually highly useful in the game.
telling the guy to suck my dick. a mistake. in a normal game this is the reflexive response because there are no consequences because they are so shallow. the guy was being nice by asking me "don't you want to play"? i took it as an insult. with such overwhelming force of course they'll ask for tribute. same as in the real world. lif teaches you hard life is. by the complexity of the modelling and the lack of relief in the punishment, it teaches you about reality. you can begin to understand history now. at the same time enjoy unmatched immersion in a fantastic place. what more can you ask from art?

Another great advantage of this game over Rust is that people who join later in the game don't have to work on our "main" fort/town, they can go anywhere in our sprawling domains and start new settlements/forts etc.
Our fort won't feel like home initially to people who didn't help build it, but we can use as many forts as possible covering our lands, so they can go further afield and start a new one from scratch. This way they learn and experience the game from the beginning, they get to design stuff too, and this stuff is HELPFUL to us unlike second bases in Rust which are generally pointless.
Plus, there is no extra upkeep for extra buildings. On the contrary, extra buildings give us points on the guild leaderboard!

Alignment from RPGs, survival elements less intrusive than Rust's and far more detailed at the same time (infernovia doesn't get this because he only played for 10 hours in a game that the early game lasts for a couple hundred hours at least). That's the opposite of Scum where the elements are both more detailed and more intrusive, or even worse Green Hell

Chat with Lobo guild
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/392053285474795530/707041802389028977/Screenshot_497.png
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/392053285474795530/707047295409061888/Screenshot_499.png

I just realized something
You can wipe the game whenever you want lol
Just leave, walk across the map and start over
Brand-new area you've never seen
When will you run out of areas to see?
The map is far larger than the larger Rust map
The idea of starting over, a brand-new fortress, with all I know now... and with a new design in my mind, inspired by all the trailers... it's very exciting
Getting wiped out... is the wipe
Moreover, people are getting wiped out all the time in the midgame and beyond
There are burning fortresses everywhere
So areas open up
It's not static
Plus if you're smart you'll find guilds and ask them permission to settle before you start building
Find the right guild, and it will shield you from inequality of starting from scratch compared to everyone else

CULT|icycalmToday at 6:08 PM
Also with a 1-month sub at $15 maxing one path takes half the time because you can increase 2 skills at the same time (in all your characters if you have multiple)
Worth considering if people plan to play for 100s of hours
Just buy one month, that's enough
Considering many of the other players, if not most, started with skills that will take us 2 months to attain, we're at a massive disadvantage
Plus they know the game and the optimal teching and building routes
Plus they have allies from before and all spawned nearby
They even know the rules lol
Knowing the rules is endgame content here
You will figure out rules just as your months of work are wiped out because you didn't know them

It's insane how much work there is to do in how many different directions
-We could harass Lobo more just in case they get the message and get off our back
-We could finish upgrading the fort to stone walls
-We could plant a few more outposts around the fort to solidify our control of the area, and/or upgrade some outposts to T2 and T3
-We could continue terraforming the empty fief that has the peak for the eventual castle
-We could take the moose and go around our neighbors looking to establish and solidify alliances/get Discord addresses
-We could begin exploring all the new buildings I can build as workshops for all the different professions
-We need more farm area, more farms, more diversity of crops
-We need to get proper armor and weapon production going and maintain a good stock
-Definitely need a couple of leveled-up healers
-The ongoing Quest for A Horse needs to... keep going, and result in a whole stable of them
-We could connect all our structures and domains with roads, and run roads also to our allies
-We can go around looking for weak players to enslave
The more you progress, the more dimensions open up in all directions
A proper king with half a dozen provinces and 200 players to oversee and half a dozen enemy and allied countries would have stuff to do and think about 24/7
I LOVE THIS FUCKING GAME

None of the main trailers show the strategy layer, just as none of the PA trailers showed the scale. Games so complex that even their own designers are confused about their own games' biggest features. PA showcased spherical planets and LiF terraforming and building. Which are awesome features, but not the chief ones. Whoever understands these genres and sees the scale of PA and strategy layer of LiF is floored--but neither trailers nor official websites--let alone reviews lol--will focus on these things, if they even mention them at all.

CULT|icycalmToday at 5:42 AM
I forgot -We can go around looking for weak players to enslave
This is the only game ever where I feel bad about even thinking this
A couple of guys jumping in to try this game would be the perfect slave fodder, but those are precisely the kind of people I am writing reviews for and trying to make them appreciate the game and hang on to it and keep playing it
If you destroy their shit...
It's just terrible
So as I was saying, I have no problem destroying obnoxious people like Lobo who attack noobs with endgame weapons, because even if you wipe them, those dudes will keep going
I don't think they have lives anyway, so they'll build back up again
But the tiny groups that dot the landscape... I can't bring myself to treat them harshly unless they act like dicks
Otherwise, the most I'd do to them is tax them reasonably, and leave them alone or try to get them to ally with me
If the opponent is honorable, I would definitely feel terrible for wiping out 6 months of their work, and taking over all the towns and castles they built stone by stone
Before taking their shit I would try to see if they would become vassals, so they can keep their shit
In contrast, I fight as dirty as possible in For Honor, because who gives a shit? The match lasts 10 minutes
This game WOULD NOT WORK without at least 6-month or better yet year-long cycles
Which means that people must have stuff to learn and build THROUGHOUT the period, so that they don't build everything in 2 weeks and then have nothing left to build, which is why you NEED the massive deep skill sets and building trees and, yes, the grind in all the professions
In Rust the building lasts a couple of weeks and everyone still acts like dicks, so a couple of weeks of investment is not enough
You need months

CULT|icycalmToday at 8:09 PM
The ideal politics for us is to be friends with all our neighbors but STILL to build the biggest domains and castles in the region so that all our neighbors will WANT to be vassals and allies in our kingdom
Then we can all join up, say 30-50 people, and go fight wars with other kingdoms further out
That's how the big battles happen in this game
So that we won't need EVERY SINGLE CULT player to be online to have a big battle
We can make do with say 5 or 6 of us at any given time plus our allies and vassals
Even if you did manage to kill all your neighbors and get them to leave the game, what would you have accomplished?
You would have a big domain, but would still only have the 10 guys in your clan moving around in it
This looks far less immersive than having 50 people move around
So we should treat our neighbors like "neutral NPCs" that must be assimilated, not killed
The only difference is that these are real people and so the slightest miscommunication or error in communication or insult can make them mortal enemies
Or if you appear weak to them by saying and doing stupid things, they will never want to be ruled by you
If they see a super strong super professional clan on the other hand, they will want to be a part of that, unless of course they too are super strong and super professional, in which case war is unavoidable

I think that when Chev became my vassal, Ciarog automatically became too because he was Chev's vassal
Pretty cool
Imagine the ramifications in complicated alliances when one King bends the knee to another. Then all his vassals bend it too to the new King whether they want to or not. They can of course change their standing later, but that incurs dishonor/alignment loss probably, not to mention anger

CULT|icycalmToday at 6:41 PM
Another thing is that I want everyone to post a pic after EVERY building you make. For example, I just saw two coops in the stream. I would rather I discovered them by checking this channel. I don't even know what they do. But if you post a pic, you can explain.
CULT|Diamond DawgToday at 6:41 PM
same farming in regards to the mill
CULT|icycalmToday at 6:42 PM
The rationale for what I am saying is that people will be able to jump in the game and know already EVERYTHING that has happened, even if they haven't played in days
If we're gonna be playing for weeks or months, we need this
It'll be like a TV show you can watch, but also jump in and affect whenever you want
It's what Quantum Break should have been like
Interactive Game of Thrones
A major change in 2017 today, that may lead to even bigger changes: Life is Feudal: MMO, which was second runner-up, is moved to first runner-up, and Breath of the Wild slides to third place. I've been playing LiF a lot more recently since the wipe, and though I've never played the Zelda, there's no doubt in my mind that LiF is far superior. The Zelda is just a dumbed-down Japanese open-world design, I am sure; LiF takes first-person 4X to a whole new level. There's simply no comparison.

moments: kojiero hauling lumber up a hill. comparison with rust moments.

CULT|icycalmToday at 10:38 AM
If they followed my MMO advice and ran the server ONLY for 4-5 hours on a Saturday, it would solve all the game's problems
We would have ALL our players on every time
All the other guilds would have all their players too
No need for "Judgement Hours"
Full loot full PVP including in buildings, and burning your crops all the time
It would be SO much more exciting. Those 4-5 hours would be filled with excitement every moment, raids all the time, etc.
And the players with jobs who can't play midweek would not miss out on anything
There would ALWAYS be people in forts to talk with and negotiate
It would be a 10x better game just by doing a simple thing: running the server like a TV show
It's already the best game of all time, it would be even better like this. 
And the best part is you wouldn't need to add a single line of code to achieve this. It is feasible right now by simply running the server on a schedule.
CULT|AgentxToday at 10:41 AM
You could have observer streams that essentially could be shows.  This week's Life is Feudal.
CULT|icycalmToday at 10:41 AM
Yep
Streamers flying around and commenting
We'll get there someday
This way you can play a super-complex game without it interfering with your life
During the week you'd make a game plan with your friends so that, come game day, you would not waste a moment
CULT|AgentxToday at 10:26 AM
Even this really basic shield looks neat :thumbsup:
CULT|icycalmToday at 10:27 AM
It has our emblem!
CULT|AgentxToday at 10:29 AM
Oh, I didn't make the connection lol.  I assumed that's just what it looked like!
CULT|icycalmToday at 10:30 AM
It's expertly woven in, as if it was done by hand and not an algorithm
But our dear car soccer expert says the game looks drab
Not enough cars in it
I said in the accessibility article that no game is too complex. I never thought I'd say this, but this game is almost too complex for me. A couple more layers of complexity and I'd have to basically drop out of life to play this game. And all that construction with the sword of damocles hanging over your head that it could be wiped in a couple of weekends if a clan among the dozens around you decides to end your game.
That pic I just posted is the most comprehensive yet. It includes both towers, the inside of the fort, the farm to the left of the background and the shacks to the right
To create all this in first/third-person out of essentially a forest in a week is the most complex and satisfying construction I've ever done in a game. Or in real life for that matter
I was planning to play Industries of Titan some more, but the construction there feels like a joke, like a mobile game, compared to this
I think in order to take other games seriously I need to detox from this for a few days, or even weeks
Talking to all these clans and figuring stuff out with them is as complex as the entire rest of the game
CULT|icycalmToday at 2:16 AM
At least I have been praying and I am not a criminal anymore. In our previous game I was a criminal but not a slave. Now I am a slave but not a criminal.
CULT|jeffrobot494Today at 1:31 AM
She goes from demanding a pittance in tribute, to the entire clan as slaves?
CULT|icycalmToday at 1:32 AM
It's a game mechanic
I am not sure what it does
I think it gives them good benefits
But maybe for us it's just an aesthetic thing
And remember, I insulted them first
They have every right to be pissed off now
I am not saying their demands are reasonable
I don't know what's reasonable in this game
I don't know the mechanics well enough
I think all the slave status does to us is put the word "slave" next to our name
We don't actually have to go work their fields or anything
But maybe it will make us ridiculous to other clans, and they won't take us seriously in diplomacy
I have never felt so weak in a game
Even if we just pay them some shit and become their slaves for a week or two until we have a full wall and good weapons, might be a good ploy
Gotta think in the long term
CULT|jeffrobot494Today at 1:37 AM
Here it is: https://lifeisfeudal.gamepedia.com/Slave
Life is Feudal Wiki
Slave
Slaves are acquired from slave camps or by taking unconscious players prisoner. Slaves improve production at outposts.

Two straight weeks of my life on a single game, and even a single run. This has never happened before. I have played a few other games for two weeks straight--various versions of Civ above all, PA, Rust, etc.--but never in a single run. That's where ultimate immersion gets you, since multiple runs are anti-immersive (which is why they say that "you only live once").

CULT|icycalmToday at 1:37 AM
If we just think, "we are fine this coming Friday so fuck them", I don't think we'll get far enough
CULT|jeffrobot494Today at 1:37 AM
It looks like you die, and they get a copy of you to take home and put to work.
CULT|icycalmToday at 1:37 AM
We have to think a month or more ahead, not a week ahead
They seem super-confident they can keep wrecking us, and now they are obsessed with us. They won't leave us alone. They come back every day and with more forces every time
And if they can do this midweek, imagine in the weekend
On the plus side, their armor is basic
Their sword seemed advanced though
So they must not have siege weapons yet
But I think when they get them it's game over for us, unless we play really good at the strategy/diplomacy layer
I don't mind this humiliation. They probably have 1000s of hours in the game and we're just learning basic mechanics
CULT|jeffrobot494Today at 1:31 AM
She goes from demanding a pittance in tribute, to the entire clan as slaves?
CULT|icycalmToday at 1:32 AM
It's a game mechanic
I am not sure what it does
I think it gives them good benefits
But maybe for us it's just an aesthetic thing
And remember, I insulted them first
They have every right to be pissed off now
I am not saying their demands are reasonable
I don't know what's reasonable in this game
I don't know the mechanics well enough
I think all the slave status does to us is put the word "slave" next to our name
We don't actually have to go work their fields or anything
But maybe it will make us ridiculous to other clans, and they won't take us seriously in diplomacy
I have never felt so weak in a game
turn based nature of mechanics reflected in little window that shows hit points and who attacked and missed. why is it showing who attacked and missed in an action game? we should be able to see it on the screen. but he knows his action mechanics are bad, so he does this.
atlas has the one thing that Lif doesn't: naval mechanics. but it dropped the terraforming which is way more important. the entire world feels much more alive and real in lif precisely because of the terraforming. to drop that in order to add ships is a grave mistake. all the more so since lif can add ships later and indeed has a plan to but atlas can't add terraforming. it's a structural issue the same as I explained that PA can add supcom's tactical depth but supcom can't add pa's planets
quality mechanics. eugenics. very subtle mechanic that changes the game a lot
they say the aesthetics are bad. it was precisely the aesthetics that kept me coming back until I finally grasped the mechanical greatness. and without my clan I would never have grasped it no matter how long I came back. the aesthetic greatness is like a movie like das boot. it's not Okami. It's European, more precisely Eastern European, more precisely Russian.
a word on the guild leaderboard. it's not outside the game it's inside the game. explain why. it's just a quick way to asses guild strength.
The worst thing about his review is that it's negative without even TOUCHING on the REAL problems the game has, simply because he hasn't played it enough and played it properly to even encounter them. It's a completely laughable review, like a journalist from the early 2000s ragging on a fighting game because he can't play it.
I posted this too
He says the world is empty with castles everywhere
But how are the castles not ruins then, since the game has steep decay requirements?
The game is brimming with life but you have to know how and WHEN to see it
And you can't do that if you are too busy haggling with your friends about walking for 15 minutes
It is even realistic that the castles are sparse and not in every square
Have you seen castles in Europe in view of each other?
You have to ride for DAYS at the least to go from one castle to another
If anything, there are TOO MANY castles in this 36x36 kilometer land
And that's with 5,000 players on
Imagine how it would be with the 40,000 players the map was designed for
It would be like Atlas on launch
Which is why it's great that Atlas has only 5-10k people now
It's basically the same little group of people playing LiF and Atlas
Full loot PVP is the most hardcore mechanic that exists
Rust used to be the king of that, and that's why, though it has always been popular, it has never been as popular as theme park MMOs, and journalists ignore it
Now if you add PERSISTENCE on top of that, like LiF and Atlas added, you lose even most of the Rust players
What you are left with is a tiny hardcore minority on Steam that looks for these games like a baby looks for milk
And of course both games had Overwhelmingly Negative reviews for most of their lifetimes
Though now I see LiF is at Mixed
So that's something
Full loot PVP
Plus large-scale complex construction
Plus persistence
The three most hardcore mechanics ever
Lots of games have one of these, a few have two, and only two games have all three
Or, if there are other games with all three, they are clearly low-budget crappy efforts not even worth installing
BRs like Warzone for example have full loot PVP
But the game only lasts for 40 minutes
And you don't build anything
So you lose almost no time and almost no "loot" when you lose
So 50 million mouthbreathers can play it
Rust has full loot PVP and complex construction
So you lose quite a lot when you lose
So it has sold about 5 million copies
Nowhere near Warzone, but it's respectable
But Rust lasts only a week, or at most 2 weeks or a month
So when you lose you lose quite a bit, but still not THAT much
So if you add persistence on top of that... it's real fucking pain
Not to mention that, precisely because of all this pain, only the most hardcore groups are playing it, so those groups will wreck your shit even harder than a random Rust clan
Then if you add STRATEGY on top of that...
Rust has no official strategy layer
You gain nothing beyond loot for wrecking bases
But LiF and Atlas have DOMAINS, with TAXABLE SUBJECTS, and a GUILD LEADERBOARD
So people are super-incentivized to enslave you or wreck your shit
And those are the most hardcore groups ever
These games are merciless
So of course the dude who can't even co-ordinate in co-op with 2 players in PA, or who haggles with his friends about walking for 15 minutes, when he drops alone in those worlds... hilarity ensues
With a genius mix of mechanics, all the most hardcore ones from the entire history of gaming--look at my GOTD feature to see the evolution of mechanics--the best mix of them like an artistic alchemist, nudging the player to BELIEVE in this land, and to ACT and BEHAVE accordingly. And at the bottom of everything we see pain.
"only great pain is the great liberator". Pain civilized humans. Pain civilized players too. And in order to feel pain, loss. And in order to feel loss, complexity. You can't feel loss in super mario bros. Or you can in arcade games, but only to a small extent because short time, no building, no strategy.

Judgement Hour is a genius compromise between my ultimate solution of running MMOs only on Saturday for 4-5 hours and the traditional stupidity of running them 24/7. I would never have thought of Judgement Hour. Tip hat to bobik for this as to so many other incredible things...

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/431940/ss_3f600d8d280578b2069c1c6eddda957aa6110234.jpg
It's pathetic to see a map like this in a game now
It's utterly meaningless
I may as well draw a map of the galaxy and pretend that my game that consists of 3 screens takes place there
Utterly dead, uninteractive maps, compared to LiF's where every square is a mini-universe

CULT|ChevRageToday at 6:04 AM
Ah, kinda lame I guess. I want to be able to put down the castle brick by brick tbh. Which I guess you already do, but I mean like outside of a build menu
CULT|AgentxToday at 6:04 AM
There could be a module for it, like gates and windows
CULT|icycalmToday at 6:11 AM
The problem with that is that 99% of the castles would look ugly then
Agent couldn't put down 5 steps like that, so think about a whole castle
CULT|ChevRageToday at 6:31 AM
Ah, I didn't think of that
CULT|AgentxToday at 6:33 AM
I was going to destroy them after I botched them, honest! :sweat_smile:
CULT|icycalmToday at 6:34 AM
The problem with modern games like this is that they are so high-resolution, that if you want to build stuff brick by brick... you have to be an architect
And not just any architect, but one who specializes in castles
CULT|ChevRageToday at 6:35 AM
And if one element gets so complex, every other element has to be increased in complexity to balance it out, right?
CULT|icycalmToday at 6:35 AM
That too
I would be happy with more building elements
Not that there aren't many
But you can always use more
Even better would be teching up to ages
I would be willing to have half the elements, if I could have another age
E.g. Renaissance that comes after the Middle Ages
CULT|AgentxToday at 6:37 AM
It was super particular though.  The strictness for building them was different for lifting and setting them down, so you really had to get it right first time.  Was still fun though :smile: and it did help me get up the ramp.
Well, I do have level 30 in Art, so we're totally ready for our renaissance :LEL:
CULT|icycalmToday at 6:42 AM
Yeah the placing systems in both this and Rust are messy
They need a snap-to feature
The sci-fi theme/age is the best for player-designed stuff, because we haven't yet seen what will happen so we have nothing to compare our designs to in reality and we don't know the science of it so everything can seem plausible
So for a game that takes you from cavemen to space, the game could make the building more modular past the present age
You really have to try Space Engineers if you like to design stuff
The building is the most flexible I've ever seen in the genre. You can put wheels and thrusters for example on anything, and it's a delight to see what will happen
You will never design something elegant like a Star Citizen ship though, which is where Star Citizen and LiF come in

CULT|icycalmToday at 6:20 AM
This game shits on entire genres
Like for example take Industries of Titan
That's a specialist city-builder with less city-building depth than this game
LiF is not a city-builder. It's not a Mount & Blade or For Honor game
It's not a Minecraft game
LiF is first-person 4X
It's not CRPG either
And to see that it has:
1. Better building than any building game
2. Deeper crafting than any crafting game
3. More complex character development than any CRPG
It's incredible
4. Deeper strategy than any strategy game
5. Deeper tactics than any tactics game
and then on top of all that deeper psychology than any game that purports to have deep psychology

The Lobos are utter low-IQ Spaniard dicks. They kill you right after you're done talking and deciding to declar war. Someone with more class would say, "Okay then, next time we meet it will be as enemes. Until then, farewell." Or something classy like that. In Rust the hardcore PVPers who kill people for no reason are merely annoying, but in LiF, when you have neighbors like the Lobos, you really grow to despise them.

Include the favorite game Steam pic in the review
if you jump in just for a battle, it sounds cool at first, but it doesn't really work. you could play for honor or bannerlord or kingdom under fire, or any number of similar games, pretty much all of them with superior combat mechanics. it is the building and the strategy MIXED with the combat that sets this game apart, and above the rest. if you do no building take no part in the strategy, which jump in? to play inferior combat? you'll be missing the whole point of the game. only to be with your buddies and if you've been following the updates and want to affect them and help out your buddies
Probably our best bet for long-term survival is to ride around the world looking for a good king, pledge allegiance, fight in his wars, and ask him to defend us against our strong neighbors
I.e. pretty much how medieval history played out
CULT|icycalmToday at 7:19 AM
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/913550211587083345/356728FFFDABD9CBCC5B0C91F1703D9B2697696A/?imw=2048&imh=857&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=true

If these are the decorative items, I think I'll end up spending much more on skins in this game than in Rust
Assuming we manage to build a town and castle decent enough to be worthy of them
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1018319704131966776/0199401CA1283A0B2830CB8455C591368DFBEBE7/

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/974352316894174782/5F60E3253370DCB01D9A4380C562717AAECEE819/

Maximize this pic on your monitor
Look at the islands in the distance
It's almost like looking at other planets as they pass by in PA
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/945084718321068770/D15BB29A65EC65C5B5152A2F29259BF0F2514EBA/

This stuff is so much more impressive than Minecraft because you know under what pressure it was made
That's without even counting how much prettier it looks either way
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/914669693485330529/FBB84B13115502A6D7C21AB9FBEB3203C7EF067A/

Look at that armor
No way is it standard
And no way I am not getting it if we ever tech that high
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/945084137294765940/27D3656BF298B90A2180C7DC67C75B10BE46DFAE/

And audience with the king
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/913550211587082835/E57A414CDC02D1C0C4E79746CA6387110F3CE569/

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/941718098295934342/56D1D53A1CC1B1B5B8A844D34D32F749C1400C1C/

Jesus
CULT|Diamond DawgToday at 7:28 AM
I wonder how long it takes to harvest fields that large
CULT|icycalmToday at 7:28 AM
There's probably some measure of automation
CULT|Diamond DawgToday at 7:28 AM
oh yeah, mills and whatnot
CULT|icycalmToday at 7:28 AM
Like with the outposts giving you shaped rock
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/951840457011523381/035DF9C519DD7FC8D67E0E0648ECF0CE6AEFB284/

Fantastic character generation
They put WRPG characters to shame
This is now my favorite game btw
I have already almost finished the last part of my essay
CULT|Diamond DawgToday at 7:30 AM
is there naval combat in this game? How are the islands handled?
CULT|AgentxToday at 7:31 AM
I think you can swim, at least. :stuck_out_tongue:
CULT|icycalmToday at 7:31 AM
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/941698908990646898/508B8093E715AAEC1AF353EBE7A46D45D6561C19/

No naval combat, but ships and shipyards were planned at some point
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2434635521238563024/EEFD36A69F2C695AA8A729BEE4B93FFC838C525D/

CULT|AgentxToday at 7:32 AM
That's so awesome right there.
CULT|icycalmToday at 7:32 AM
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/943937754990479507/AD3CB7BD1B0550AE2B507C40B1DD870717BDF7FB/

It looks so cool when two groups of geared dudes are just talking
In ANY other such game they would be killing each other
Now everyone acts so naturally as if they are actors in a movie, without anyone forcing them to
That's what genius mechanics do
This is the title the pic's author gave his pic:
"Acompañando al Rey de Aquilonia a hablar con miembros de la Guardia Real"
You simply take pleasure in the power of the group, and in its trafficking with other powerful groups, without raising a muscle
Eventually, the showdowns will come
And they'll be all the sweeter for the build-up
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/918039690678089362/0884136CED11C6DE5E70DBF1E7860551773A0BDE/

Author's title: "Home sweet home"
Imagine riding for an hour across the map, taking part in a siege, surviving it, getting mad loot on you, then surviving another hour back home, to come back to this insane town and castle that you build up brick by brick over MONTHS
It REALLY feels like home then!
I have never heard of another game that achieves this
My character has been eating better these past few days than me
Merely to build these awesome things I have been posting you have to have a flair for architecture and urban planning, if not a degree in them
Our stuff is wretched in comparison
And if we want to improve it, we can't just MS Paint it like in Minecraft
We have to fucking fight for it
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1018319581186052970/65CE1E3C7A931714FB153070DD66D137CF3A9C35/

See my stuff comes out like this
Very unnatural due to all the symmetry
I want to overcome this
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/768358091099727733/31D8DAF5CCB1D92FE1FECE89ECE3F0CF7EBAD355/

Game makes even resting look cool
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/969872066396054587/FDF1DFD2319801C23A4694C1072A818AC4A3F2A4/

The castles are the protagonists in this game
Seeing them peek behind mists or forests...
When I see something like that in our vicinity I feel dread like I have never felt in a game
I feel our doom
It almost makes me want to bend the knee and become a vassal to the superior beings who built them
Maybe I'll end up doing it lol
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/957486694778832345/E79F708F5B525304F37B8FE3BAB5A002CD75FFB6/

Jesus
Author's title: "Rassemblement avant la bataille"
Looks like a fucking painting
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1007024214550815755/B1F5CD99207AA4FF50C4D503953D7DD754033C70/

Jesus fucking christ
CULT|AgentxToday at 7:44 AM
Oooh, that's fancy!
I like the windows.
CULT|icycalmToday at 7:45 AM
Probably 5 euros per window
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/956345326226207069/63622E3AA941728427AFAFC587175D2CAAEF8872/

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/940583049499424166/905B3838EA0001C42EEDEAF25B7E36A93942447F/

Arriving at an island, ready to plan a fort...
Bliss
I can't wait to ride north and start a backup settlement
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/945084718321069592/56361E73906CD78B54C073658396114FB4D89DEE/

Interior decoration
Right out of Game of Thrones
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/952960817909980343/EB9F8827421DE7EFB76F58E11DC44CFF8009F457/

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/959714766366341480/1DBDF07C67D8574413C81ADDCABCBD5032B01C21/

Somebody made a tunnel through a mountain btw
It was on the developers' blog
You can make absolutely anything


"Described as a "real life Medieval simulator MMO", the game features a 21km x 21km world inspired by the cold regions of Northern Europe."
The new map is 36x36
So if you do the math it's probably 3x larger or something
1296 square kilometers... utterly dwarfing even the largest Rust maps, but unlike Rust you have a reason to go everywhere here, or at least as far as you CAN go


https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTjCA3p8WejL-B7Gdrtao7A
YouTube
Life is Feudal
Life is Feudal is a franchise of realistic medieval games with strong sandbox emphasis. Life is Feudal: MMO - Hardcore Sandbox MMORPG with up to 10000 player...

re: pay to win. there is a tiny bit of it. plus a lot of pay to look good. i pay as much as I can and urge others to do the same. if i was rich I'd give the devs 100s if not 1000s of dollars every month, and get my rich friends to do likewise. you want the best game ever to get even better, this is what you do. i wish i could take all the money i've spent on arcade boards and send it to bobik. hell i might actually do this if no game manages to surpass this soon and we end up playing it for months and years, as it currently looks like we'll play it

10k subs lol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxMfWRptuX8
YouTube
Life is Feudal
Life is Feudal: MMO --  0.2.0 Released!

Dude, with that beauty in our current location, who wouldn't want to see the whole map?
The natives are VERY well done aesthetically
Watch that video
"New chat connected with Discord"
Gotta find how that works to get neighbors on Discord
They called that patch 0.20
That means that at least at that point they had massive plans ahead
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8remNyeSAJ4
YouTube
Life is Feudal
Behind the Scenes | Sean Bean Animated Intro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6l0cgd0SoY
YouTube
Life is Feudal
Life is Feudal: Forest Village Official Full Release!

Jesus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8LJLQ2qpb0
YouTube
Life is Feudal
Life is Feudal - Dive into a Medieval World

This is probably the coolest 16-second trailer of all time
The various vistas flashing by for nanoseconds are awe-inspiring
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_2cYpvjMp8
YouTube
Life is Feudal
This World Awaits You - Life is Feudal: MMO

I can't believe the crazy variety of stuff you can build based on the same building blocks
Every single trailer is a delight--and a challenge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8OUJPU0CA4
YouTube
Life is Feudal
Torture Meeting Room

bobik looks cool and his cool af taste is plastered over every bit of media the studio releases
CULT|icycalmToday at 8:37 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0whIo2ty8M
YouTube
Life is Feudal
Life is Feudal: MMO Open Beta Tests Trailer (Director's Cut)

Mixing actors with play footage, incredible production values, even the logo is epic
Added to top trailers at no. 2
CULT|icycalmToday at 9:05 PM
Meanwhile Rust still lacks a real trailer (the one they have is fan made and they licensed it)
And an intro
And lore
And any kind of background or story or narrative
And it left EA like 2 years ago while LiF is EA 0.2
Is it any wonder that Rust hasn't bothered with an endgame, or even a very deep midgame?
They have bothered with nearly nothing
You can see who the real artist is here
The other guys just stumbled blindly on their game with next to no vision at all

lol I just realized the game's pretty much only fault is perfectly reflected in its title
Life is Feudal is a philosophical statement
But life ISN'T feudal
We are in the modern age now
And there were other ages before, and there will be others later
E.g. the planetary annihilation age that is coming
So the game should have been titled Feudal Life: MMO
That's not a philosophical statement, it merely describes what the game is about, it's about feudal life
And the ONLY way you could make this game SIGNIFICANTLY better is to... add more ages
CULT|jeffrobot494Today at 7:04 PM
Life is Feudal sounds cooler than Feudal Life, though. It's absolute and grim.
CULT|icycalmToday at 7:04 PM
"Come and make a private claim in our lands. We will protect you. Just pay us some taxes, and no harm will come to you."
CULT|jeffrobot494Today at 7:05 PM
Sorry, didn't mean to interrupt you guys there. I just read what icy posted above.
CULT|icycalmToday at 7:05 PM
You are right jeff
Artistically, the current title is better
Artistic license/exaggeration to make a point
As opposed to my drab philosophical title

CULT|icycalmToday at 4:41 AM
Via the site?
I want to play more but I am exhausted after two weeks. I'll see if I have the energy to play tomorrow.
I think we might have missed the barley harvest, plus some domains might need upkeep.
CULT|ChevRageToday at 4:43 AM
Yeah, through the site.
I'll be jumping on later for a couple of hours to check the barley. I think crops last a bit before we miss them. What are we using the barley for? Straw?
CULT|icycalmToday at 4:46 AM
Yep
If instead of all of us trying to pile on when someone is playing, we play at separate times, we might be able to keep this going long-term, or at least longer
If we all take a break at the same time, the run is doomed
It's the game's and the genre's fault for running the servers 24/7
It is exhausting to play like this
It's super immersive for as long as you play non-stop, but you can't play non-stop forever

Moral messages abound in Life is Feudal: after spending hundreds of hours digging ditches and hauling lumber, one log at time at a glacial pace, you finally start to grasp the value of enslaving people even if you're a braindead liberal: you hunt down and put weak and stupid people to work so you can have the time to focus on science and technology (teching up the skill paths), and on grand politics to remake the world in your image and impose progress and civilization on it (the strategy layer). Marxism too goes into the rubbish bin once you start to realize how much hard labor you must put in to upkeep your domains; why not capture whole provinces and guilds and tax them enough so they do the low-skilled manual labor for you instead? The game's ultra-realism justifies, and explains, all of human history, giving players through its genius set of rules just the right incentives to behave in the exact same manner they would have if they were really living in the Middle Ages. A game that justifies war and slavery to a degree no videogame--no work of art period--has done before. If this isn't the peak of art I don't know what would be. And the sheer merciless "grind" it imposes on weak players is precisely the means to that, turning one of the most hated concepts in all of gaming into the very means by which it bludgeons them over the head with its blunt message. Utter genius--which, of course, could only have come from Russia now that the Western democracies are too weak to gives us programmers and publishers who are not for all intents and purposes homosexual, let alone games that glorify slavery. Maybe one day they will give us a game that glorifies rape too. Heat already has procreation mechanics; add those to LiF and the Rape Update practically begs to be added.

Alex Kierkegaard's Armageedon goes from cavemen to nanomachine armies spreading across the galaxy. But until then, let bobik's masterpiece take you back to a time when knights roamed the European lands, when men themselves were carved out of steel and stone.

no doubt now it's a better game than rust. much better even. all my ideas for uberrust are contained in here. with the leaderboard in the game rather than outside it so much more immersive
all the trailers. the castles dominate like hulking monstrosities proudly proclaiming their owner's ambition. you can tell the character of the lord by a look at his castle. european rock. fearsome knights in full plate. weight everywhere. It helps us to make sense of our history.
This Russian game. This European game.
The most hardcore game.
A man's game.
This is the best game I've yet played.

bobik I bow to you. the whole of the art world bows to you, even if they don't know it. i'll make them know it. i'll make them bow to you. you are the master now. you are at the top.


LIFE IS FEUDAL: MMO IS INSOMNIA'S BEST GAME OF ALL TIME.