Not yet, but I did start playing it today and it was pretty fun. I only managed to exit the shelter then saved it there. I’ll let you know if I run across a similar issue.
Somebody made a mod integrating Mount & Blade with Crusader Kings 3. Basically, when you start any battle in CK3, the mod pauses your game and loads a M&B battle for you to fight. Just like with Total War battles, troop numbers have to be abstracted a bit for the limits of the game engine, but the ratios are correct. When the battle ends, it loads you back into CK3 and calculates the casualties based on your performance.
I doubt the mod has any way to mirror commander traits or other important battle modifiers, but it’s still an incredibly cool idea.
Cool, and also thanks again for recommending ‘Control’ in my PC thread-- having a lot of fun with that one. I was stuck on a certain level early on and it was pretty frustrating, but I finally got past it and now the story is really opening up and I’m making decent progress. Definitely my favorite game right now.
RE: Fallout 4, I was playing last night and a kind of weird and amusing thing happened (spoilering for EllisDee’s benefit):
In the mission to clear out Concord, I mistook the leader of the Minutemen Preston Garvey, who was shooting the raygun from the balcony of the Freedom Museum, as another raider and shot at him. So when I finished clearing all the raiders and the game said to meet Preston back inside the museum, he was hostile to me and starting shooting at me with his raygun. So I shot back at him and Dogmeat attacked him until I ran out of ammo and switched to a switchblade. Having to work close quarters, the talk thing came up and an animation triggered where Preston was telling me to join him and his cause in Sanctuary. But even while he was talking, Dogmeat was still attacking him. And afterward, Dogmeat continued to attack him, and none of my ‘stay’ or ‘follow’ commands would get the dog to back off!
I finally had to just leave them both in the Freedom Museum and proceed on my way back to Sanctuary, hoping the game will reset itself and Preston will be there and no longer be hostile. I hope I don’t have to start over again to redo Concord. Traded Trashcan Carla for a bunch of ammo so I’m resupplied. So that seemingly useless crap DOES come in handy! Even teddy bears and meal trays are one credit each.
BTW @Skywatcher, thanks for the tip to take cover in the restaurant and shoot at the Deathclaw from there with the minigun, that did the trick.
Last night I had a dream in which different pieces of furniture and other objects were outlined in either red or blue, depending on their usefulness to me…
I did the exact same thing! First time I played, I made the mistake of approaching from the side and didn’t realize the figure on the balcony was shooting at raiders. He didn’t seem to mind, though.
The game is supposed to work that way, yes.
It’s worth pointing out, actually: save all the time, and make lots of new save files rather than relying on quick save. There are a number of potential bugs that can lock you out of moving forward in important quest lines.
Intel 12th generation (Alder Lake) is out and available for purchase as of a couple days ago, or possibly yesterday. Reviews were blacked out until release day, so, what was the verdict? Positive, turns out.
I watched both Gamers Nexus reviews from yesterday. The first review was for the 12900K (link), then the 12600K (link) second. Combined that’s over 50 minutes of video. To summarize:
Intel doubled power usage to improve speed, which does work but of course comes with cooling issues. The 12900K flagship ($600) beats AMD’s 5950x ($700) pretty handily almost across the board, and boasts an impressive 30-40% improvement over the $500 10900K. (The 11900K ($550) performed worse than the 10900K due to having fewer cores.)
The 12600K ($300) is roughly on par with the 10900K, which is impressive, and beats or at least matches AMD’s 5600x (also $300) in almost all tests.
12th gen chips are next generation architecture, with both PCIe Gen 5 and DDR5. The DDR5 memory has much higher bandwidth than DDR4, so some of the performance gains in the tests are certainly attributable to that. And unfortunately, you’re probably doubling the price of a motherboard to run any 12th generation chip. More like $360 than $180. Plus you need to pay for a premium water cooler almost regardless, and you’ll definitely want a mesh case. Bigger is probably better for ventilation.
DDR5 ram is expensive as shit – double or even triple the price of DDR4 – but also pretty darn fast. Figure in the 5200 to 6000 mts range compared to 3200 to 4000 mts for DDR4. But like every generation jump, latency takes a huge hit. Now instead of CL14 or CL16 you’re looking at more like CL38. (DDR3 was typically CL8 or 9.) Lower is better.
If you’re wondering about that PCIe version, that wasn’t a typo. Alder Lake chips can/do run PCIe Gen 5. That seems weird to me, since PCIe Gen 3 was the mainstay for a decade and then PCIe Gen 4 came out in August. Here it is November and Gen 4 is already previous generation. So again, how much of this CPU speed improvement is due to the architecture around it and how much is due to the CPU itself?
They also tested on Windows 10 because nobody runs Windows 11 yet. Windows 11 is supposed to be optimized for Alder Lake, though their initial tests didn’t show much improvement if any. Windows 11 isn’t polished yet, though.
Look at these power usage numbers. It’s just nuts.
| Price | CPU | Power |
|---|---|---|
| $300 | 5600x | 67.2 |
| $300 | 12600K | 118.2 |
| $500 | 10900K | 129.6 |
| $600 | 12900K | 243.6 |
| $700 | 5950x | 120.0 |
I really like my 64 watt i5 10400. It runs so cool and the machine is so quiet. 240 watts just seems like crazy town to me.
Spoilers for raiders in Fallout 4:
Virtually all of the major raider cells keep intel on each other. Taking out almost any raider leader in their stronghold will prompt other leaders to note this on their terminals.
That group in Concord is from the first stronghold the game sends you to, the leader of which knows Mama Murphy and has been trying to duplicate her chem-induced gift.
Yeah, was happy to see universal praise for the new chips. I’ll probably wait another year before upgrading since it’ll be a new CPU/MB/RAM/PSU/AIO for me so I’ll be waiting for prices to go down and some of the glitches to get ironed out. But unless AMD has something amazing up their sleeve, it looks like Intel for the new generation.
While the new chips are hot, I do hope that properly designed coolers will help. Right now you can buy converter kits for your block but the new Alder Lake chips are larger and sized differently and the hottest parts aren’t in the center. So even a cooler with an adapter isn’t really designed for it. Also the top cover on the CPU is thinner so current coolers aren’t designed to press down on it as tightly as it might need. Hence me adding a new AIO to my shopping list – I’d want one designed around Alder Lake if I was already hip deep in new components.
Well, I had some minigun ammo left after killing the Deathclaw, so I really went to town on him and that musta really pissed him off. So when he was hostile back in the museum, I figured ok, maybe in this scenario I have no other recourse but to kill him and take over as leader of the Minutemen or something. But turns out he’s unkillable-- his HP will drop to 0, he’ll look dead for a couple seconds, then shake it off and his HP magically restores.
I seem to have a real knack for pissing off friendlies in P4-- in my first go-round, before I started a new game, I helped the woman and her drug addict son in the diner fight the drug dealers, but then I started picking up random stuff in the diner just as I had gotten in the habit of doing. They got angry at me for stealing, turned hostile and started shooting, and I had to kill them. Oopsie 
Thanks for another great tip!
About Mama Murphy:
Talking to her and bringing the requested chems will result in her giving nonviolent options for whichever part of the main quest you were on when she made the request. She can also give the location to the duplicate of a certain key. The chem called “Psycho” will kill her.
Especially in a certain part of Vault 81 and reload after getting infected.
These days, I simply bypass all that by using a mod which enables access via the exit. This mod is available via the game’s modding interface on PC & Xbox.
Yeah, a year from now should be a pretty good sweet spot for a high-end machine. A year from now the new motherboard, cooler, DDR5 RAM, and PCIe Gen whatever technologies will have matured and come down in price nicely. And by that time, 13th gen should be out and will likely use those same then-matured technologies.
I was thinking that if someone wanted to build a pretty nice system right now, I think I might go with a 10900K (maybe paired with a 3070 ti or 3080) and just get really nice PCIe Gen 3 components and really fast low latency DDR4 memory.
Hope so. Read a story recently where an MSI rep was saying to give it a year before DDR5 pricing started to reach parity with what you’d expect to pay for DDR4 today.
I’m in an okay spot where my i7-9700k (OC to 5GHz), 3080Ti and 32GB DDR4-3200 is more than sufficient to play anything I want at 1440p with high frame rates but will also enjoy that jump to new PCIe and RAM tech once I commit to basically rebuilding my entire system aside from the GPU.
My best friend just spent $17,000 on a new gaming PC. I don’t even know if it’s possible for it to be worth that.
I don’t know how you could possibly spend that much on a PC. I guess if you’re using enterprise/server class CPUs/motherboards that have no benefit to desktop usage and, I don’t know, absurd amounts of ram and hard drives? It would be hard to price a system that high without mostly useless exotic parts.
I think technically 3090s might still retain their SLI hardware, but in practice that’s a bad idea and almost nothing supports SLI anymore and the only reason you’d do that is if you wanted to spend as much money as you could on a PC.
Well, it has a GTX 1660 Super in it.
Zing!
They do but, as you noted, it’s somewhere between pointless and bad for consumer use. It’s intended for people using their 3090s for machine learning experiments or other scientific uses.
You could definitely spend $17,000 on a top-notch flight or racing sim setup without being “wasteful.”
OK, so what is it?
You CAN spend $17k on a gaming PC. I went on Maingear and picked their most expensive base configuration option then loaded it with a 12900k CPU, dual SLI 3090s, custom hardline water cooling, three 2TB NVMe drives, three more 4TB SSDs, custom automotive paint, etc and was at $16.5k before I stopped adding stuff (I could have added another SSD but that would just be silly). If you include top of the line peripherals and a monitor in your cost, you’ll easily breach that line since I got there without them.
This doesn’t mean it’s really WORTH $17k (I’m sure Maingear has a hefty premium in there) or that it’s a good investment for 99.99% of use cases but, if you have the money and want to spend it, you can certainly do so without needing to buy a snow leopard-lined case or anything.
Edit: The best PSU they offered was a 1200W which doesn’t feel sufficient for an overclocked i9-12900k and two RTX 3090s plus all those drives, water pump, etc.
In Fallout 4 I’m trying to follow the Melee Master build from Fallout 4 Character Builds - EIP Gaming. Seems fine, but now that I’m level 2 (I think), the guide says I’m supposed to be able to pick three perks but the game says I only have a single point to spend. I can spend that one point on a single ability raise, or a single perk.
Am I supposed to be able to get more than one perk when I take my first levelup? If so, how?