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Ah, Thumper, such an ignomious end... Yet tasty-looking. Though at the same time, I'd still be worried I would be viciously attacked by his remains. :)

Harry's going through a bit of a late-game slump, but at least he can take solace from the fact it'll all be over in five years. Then he'll have to plot taking over another realm, another timeline again. For now, though, at least he still has his coffee.
 
That truly was a dramatic and sudden fall for the CSA, it almost makes me feel a bit sorry for the Big Yin. Although not nearly as sorry as I feel for poor old Thumper, he didn't deserve that end. Well, more accurately he probably did considering the amount of people he terrorised. A pity Harry is feeling rather down at present, even winning the Olympics seems to have done nothing for his mood. I'm sure something will perk him up once again though. Perhaps some coffee?
 
I have seen enough cheap horror films to doubt that we have seen the end of Thumper. At the least I would expect to see a baby rabbit with pointy teeth hop across the credits at end of the last chapter. This would hint at things to come in Thumper II (which might see young son-of-Thumper visit mystical eastern temples before returning to wreak his revenge on the his father's killers.....).
 
I have seen enough cheap horror films to doubt that we have seen the end of Thumper. At the least I would expect to see a baby rabbit with pointy teeth hop across the credits at end of the last chapter. This would hint at things to come in Thumper II (which might see young son-of-Thumper visit mystical eastern temples before returning to wreak his revenge on the his father's killers.....).

I would watch this movie.
 
Ah, Thumper, such an ignomious end... Yet tasty-looking. Though at the same time, I'd still be worried I would be viciously attacked by his remains. :)

Harry's going through a bit of a late-game slump, but at least he can take solace from the fact it'll all be over in five years. Then he'll have to plot taking over another realm, another timeline again. For now, though, at least he still has his coffee.

and a party ... it has to end with a party ... & possibly rabbit stew

That truly was a dramatic and sudden fall for the CSA, it almost makes me feel a bit sorry for the Big Yin. Although not nearly as sorry as I feel for poor old Thumper, he didn't deserve that end. Well, more accurately he probably did considering the amount of people he terrorised. A pity Harry is feeling rather down at present, even winning the Olympics seems to have done nothing for his mood. I'm sure something will perk him up once again though. Perhaps some coffee?

Harry is feeling under-loved. The primary problem is I made the mistake of granting all the political reforms too early (great for immigrants but...) so can now not do anything as the army (of which bits keep revolting) has to stay at home to deal with the endless revolts ... I can't generate enough enthusiasm for the social reforms I need.

I have seen enough cheap horror films to doubt that we have seen the end of Thumper. At the least I would expect to see a baby rabbit with pointy teeth hop across the credits at end of the last chapter. This would hint at things to come in Thumper II (which might see young son-of-Thumper visit mystical eastern temples before returning to wreak his revenge on the his father's killers.....).

Indeed, and the comment about eastern temples may be more true than you realise ... just because he's both dead and eaten is not always the end?

I would watch this movie.

Ok, I'll see what I can produce

which leads us to ...
 
In which Harry parties like its the end of time

Dramatis Personae

Harry – a bar owner with HR problems
Fluffy – visiting a long lost friend in New York
Astarte – trying to make up to Raphael
Raphael - a Pope drawing on his last reserves
Freyja – making up with Harry
Gabi – cements his relationship with Harry
Our IT person – who should have remembered not to stroke stray cats

Scene 1: A street in New York

Our IT person is walking home ... he starts to think he is safe despite all he has learnt



But he feels he is being stalked



Only to find a cute white cat waiting for him



Terrible screams rend the night ...

:ninja:

by the time the neighbours arrive all that is left is his dismembered body .... and a strange card



Scene 2: The Bar - One Hell of a Party

With the exception of the Big Yin (who is sulking) many of our celestial leaders are attending the notorious across eternity "Party like its 1936" event

As ever these parties are not peaceful. The waiters want more pay.

"Now, now we should stand up for our rights, thumper is in the stew, fluffy is away, it will never a be a better time"

"lets go"



Harry sighs, and leaves the room to wake up the guards



Shortly afterwards, the remaining waiters are back at work



meanwhile at the party

Insults fly



Odin catches Harry and Freyja together



Harry and Gabi have a chat

"Harry what do you think?"



"I'm ... I'm ... well I'm rather proud of you"

"friends"

"of course"



Astarte is still trying to seduce Raphael



"look you really don't understand ... its not that I'm evil ... more I'm drawn that way"



The final titles roll over the scenes of debauchery and excess



Or is it?


....



Which wraps up these wee tale (tail?).

Many thanks to all who have read it, especially to the regular commentators and for the surprising number of awards its won. Oddly I don't think its quite worked as its easy in CK to impose characters on top of what is already a character driven game but here the outside characters seem to have no basis in the game's natural evolution.

But I don't think AARland has seen the last of Harry ...
 
That seemed so quick. Damn those Paradox people for making any game that lasts less than 400 years.

While you may have been missing the characters of the (nominal) human rulers, I thought you did well with displaying the gods' characters through their bitching and backstabbing. I suppose that it is part of the story of the Victorain age that individual characters start to become less important as modern nations/empires rise to the fore.
 
Not the end, eh? What could be next... a conversion to HoI, perhaps? :D

Although I haven't been commenting, I have been following and enjoying this AAR since the beginning (South American democracies are fun)

Well done, and good luck in your future endeavours!
 
I really enjoyed this; taking Venezuela to #2 is no mean feat! I look forward to your next AAR.
 
Many thanks to all who have read it, especially to the regular commentators and for the surprising number of awards its won. Oddly I don't think its quite worked as its easy in CK to impose characters on top of what is already a character driven game but here the outside characters seem to have no basis in the game's natural evolution.

I think it did work, but I'd agree that V2 doesn't make it easy to fit characters into as you have to keep track of them outside the confines of the game. Doubly hard for you as your characters were scattered around the major powers rather than concentrated in a single county.

Anyway, congratulations to Harry for brewing world-beating coffee for a century, and for being a surprisingly liberal sort.
 
It's over?!? The end came a bit quicker than I expected - but I guess bloodily crushing Communist insurrections while not being able to enact economic reforms does not for a lot of narrative make. :)

The promise of more to come (albeit it lacking any definitive timeline - I shall have to exercise patience) is very much welcome.

Proof - if proof were ever needed - that Harry is drinking stronger stuff than his coffee:
"Harry what do you think?"

"I'm ... I'm ... well I'm rather proud of you"

"friends"

"of course"
That isn't just a mild case of booze-induced poor judgment, this is beer goggles times ten. I think Harry's going to feel rather dirty when he wakes up next morning. :p
 
This does seem a bit sudden! Rather sad to see this end but at least it has gone out with something of a bang; millions of waiters on strike (note to self; never work for a coffee chain), more fluffy kittens causing fear and mayhem, lots of diplomatic backstabbing as ever and a fantastic finish for Venezuela despite having suffered through Harry's management (the coffee must work well, Harry was really rather competent on the whole!).

I personally felt that V2 worked rather well for Harry and crew, you worked the events to fit the AAR rather brilliantly on the whole. Oh and I'm glad I'm not going nuts, I checked your inkwell recently and saw the mention for The Queen Mother's Diaries but I couldn't remember having seen such an AAR anywhere! So it is next and an EU3 AAR to boot. Looking forward to it.
 
Thanks to everyone for the comments very gratifying to feel it did work.

Before answering the individual messages, a common theme is brevity ... but an awful lot V2 aars are brief (I mean even Rens has actually finished one) and most (setting aside the interactive ones as they have very different dynamics) seem to be 8-12 pages long. There's been a bit of chat about this and why elsewhere and why we're not seeing anythin like 'Fire Warms' or 'Special Providence' et al for V2. I think part of this is its new, so most AARs are in the gameplay phase and with a major expansion on the horizon (plus no doubt a couple of patches to follow) its no time to start an AAR that has the potential to last many a year. But I think its a bit more than that. In part a lot of AARs work around the game's electoral cycle so that tends to give you 25-30 updates for the century but I think its more how it plays. To me its a very elegant, slightly hands off game and once Avindian taught me how to grasp the basics it rattles along at a fair pace (even for me who is an inveterate pauser - I'd be rubbish at MP in the Paradox model ... I'm rubbish at AGEOD PBEM as well but for a different reason). Even so, unless a major war broke out, I could play 3-4 years at a sitting (& then that tended to become the currency of the next update). Its not character based (not that stops anyone from doing wonderful character based AARs in V1), but I do think there is scope for a slow detailed AAR as a sort of economic history.

Whether anyone would read I'm not sure - lets face it Economic History is (for perfectly understandable reasons) not the most popular subject area but all you need is there in the game.

Another reason why the ends seem odd is they often aren't that clear cut. You finish a HOI3 game usually with your faction utterly dominant (or utterly humbled) so the end isn't a product of the clock but of a clear cut outcome. You tend to finish an EU game as a relatively major power clearly ruling a portion of the globe (or as a WC) and so on. But its easy to reach the end of a V2 game as the big power in your own part of the globe, and with other big powers still around - so in the sense of the narrative we expect in an AAR the natural ending isn't there?

dunno, but thems my ideas at the moment ... enough rambling and on with the feedback:


That seemed so quick. Damn those Paradox people for making any game that lasts less than 400 years.

While you may have been missing the characters of the (nominal) human rulers, I thought you did well with displaying the gods' characters through their bitching and backstabbing. I suppose that it is part of the story of the Victorain age that individual characters start to become less important as modern nations/empires rise to the fore.

I'm glad it worked - I was delighted when I found I could access the diplomatic insults of the various rulers as that produced a mass of instances to hang their characters around (& at least to me, that some of them came from CK with fully formed characters and a lot of previous involvement helped)

Not the end, eh? What could be next... a conversion to HoI, perhaps? :D

Not sure it would work. The wider world wasn't that interesting, France is strong, Germany divided, UK still spans the globe, the only place where it could be feisty is in the Far East, but theres no clear map to the faction system (just a few states have gone Communist). Its a bit like why I never tried to convert my CK game to EU, apart from a stronger than normal Russia (& that Russia was anything but normal), the rest of the world offered nothing interesting to see how it would develop.

Although I haven't been commenting, I have been following and enjoying this AAR since the beginning (South American democracies are fun)

Well done, and good luck in your future endeavours!

appreciate your comments now. Yes Latin America is a hoot in V2. Theres a nice balance of power at the start, you need to dodge GPs etc (I was so lucky with Columbia wrecking its army in the forests of Brazil), but using the immigration and culture trick you can come to be hegemonic on the continent and usually play the colonization game too.

I really enjoyed this; taking Venezuela to #2 is no mean feat! I look forward to your next AAR.

What I liked was I never got the liberals out of power (gave too many political reforms too early), so I had to manage the economy with NFs, taxes, tariffs and the stockpile. I never had a sustained gap on a good I really needed (ammunition around the 1870s was the only one), so it proves those tools do work and it was fun playing around with them as I juggled between numbers (craftsmen were rarely a problem due to immigration) but I often needed fresh capitalist blood and focus on particular industrial branches.

I think it did work, but I'd agree that V2 doesn't make it easy to fit characters into as you have to keep track of them outside the confines of the game. Doubly hard for you as your characters were scattered around the major powers rather than concentrated in a single county.

Anyway, congratulations to Harry for brewing world-beating coffee for a century, and for being a surprisingly liberal sort.

as above, he was forced to be liberal ... I was actually aimiing for State Capitalism as most advice for Latin America on the main forum reccomends that as a key tool. But it was when I spotted the potential of playing around with the diplomatic messages that gave me a lot of character narrative. Some came from the CK game so Harry was easy to play as affable, incompetent and dangerous, Astarte as sex crazed, efficient and very dangerous, Micky as a bit of a bufoon with delusions of grandeur, Raphael as rather repressed and not happy with the world (that Italy built no rail roads to the 1900s was a real boon) & Gabi sort of lost between an allegiance to Harry and being, after all, the Archangel Gabriel.

It's over?!? The end came a bit quicker than I expected - but I guess bloodily crushing Communist insurrections while not being able to enact economic reforms does not for a lot of narrative make. :)

The promise of more to come (albeit it lacking any definitive timeline - I shall have to exercise patience) is very much welcome.

Proof - if proof were ever needed - that Harry is drinking stronger stuff than his coffee:
That isn't just a mild case of booze-induced poor judgment, this is beer goggles times ten. I think Harry's going to feel rather dirty when he wakes up next morning. :p

That last revolt was scary, so didn't dare risk even a minor war till it was over.

You mean the ultimate male bonding scene in the history of cinema does nothing for you ....

This does seem a bit sudden! Rather sad to see this end but at least it has gone out with something of a bang; millions of waiters on strike (note to self; never work for a coffee chain), more fluffy kittens causing fear
and mayhem, lots of diplomatic backstabbing as ever and a fantastic finish for Venezuela despite having suffered through Harry's management (the coffee must work well, Harry was really rather competent on the whole!).

I personally felt that V2 worked rather well for Harry and crew, you worked the events to fit the AAR rather brilliantly on the whole. Oh and I'm glad I'm not going nuts, I checked your inkwell recently and saw the mention for The Queen Mother's Diaries but I couldn't remember having seen such an AAR anywhere! So it is next and an EU3 AAR to boot. Looking forward to it.

I also shifted the time line of the events a lot to fit the narrative, but I think you could still work out the real sequence. And as with 'Tales' I also missed out a mass of important stuff (battles and so on) if they didn't fit my theme.

Aye, my last attempt at an EU one was a short disaster but I've been playing around with Hansa and reckon that Ming has real potential ... & since the Queen Mother is both immortal and her palace is a meeting place for various dieties (according to Chinese myths), who knows who wil turn up

But I won't start it till later in the year ... I need to get the GPW done before it takes over my life.
 
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Before answering the individual messages, a common theme is brevity ... but an awful lot V2 aars are brief (I mean even Rens has actually finished one) and most (setting aside the interactive ones as they have very different dynamics) seem to be 8-12 pages long. There's been a bit of chat about this and why elsewhere and why we're not seeing anythin like 'Fire Warms' or 'Special Providence' et al for V2. I think part of this is its new, so most AARs are in the gameplay phase and with a major expansion on the horizon (plus no doubt a couple of patches to follow) its no time to start an AAR that has the potential to last many a year. But I think its a bit more than that. In part a lot of AARs work around the game's electoral cycle so that tends to give you 25-30 updates for the century but I think its more how it plays. To me its a very elegant, slightly hands off game and once Avindian taught me how to grasp the basics it rattles along at a fair pace (even for me who is an inveterate pauser - I'd be rubbish at MP in the Paradox model ... I'm rubbish at AGEOD PBEM as well but for a different reason). Even so, unless a major war broke out, I could play 3-4 years at a sitting (& then that tended to become the currency of the next update). Its not character based (not that stops anyone from doing wonderful character based AARs in V1), but I do think there is scope for a slow detailed AAR as a sort of economic history.

Whether anyone would read I'm not sure - lets face it Economic History is (for perfectly understandable reasons) not the most popular subject area but all you need is there in the game.

I actually really like economic history. :rolleyes:

We're beginning to see a few more character based AARs, such as ThunderHawk3's Ambition, but I'd agree with the general conclusion that we're still in an early phase. I have the feeling that narrative AARs are rarer beasts anyway as they require a hell of a lot more effort and skill than most of us (myself included) are willing or able to commit.

From an AAR author's point of view, my major gripe with V2 is the lack of a more dynamic political system. POPs have a party preference and only shift away from it very slowly, leaving parties in power for decades. The old saying that oppositions don't win elections so much as governments lose them doesn't really fit in V2. Ideally, POPs would not only have an ideology, but also an activity/apathy modifier, which shows how likely they were to vote. If a party has been in power for too long, or is mired in corruption (presumably event-driven) or too warlike (especially if it's nominally Anti-Military), then its supporters would be less likely to vote, giving the opposition an in. Similarly, opposition supporters should grow more active the longer they are from power.