I keep thinking about the guy complaining that Tom Morello from Rage Against The Machine got political with that one picture of his guitar, and the reddit comment or whatever asking what type of machine he thought the band was raging against - kitchen appliances?

I think he made decent enough content when the competition wasn’t particularly fierce, then kept coasting on the early adopter acclaim.

Skirmishers as in “Light Cavalry”, designed to catch closing archery and ride them down? I’m not big on RTS (I suck at multitasking), but I’m always fascinated by gamified implementations of historical dynamics.

I don’t suppose they also support “recruit auxiliary specialists” as option?

Announcing the new “Royal Stables” DLC: “Marauders & Massacres” is sure to spice up your medieval farm simulation!

They were also rare. To effectively pull off horse archery, you needed good horses, good riders that also happened to be good archers (both of which weren’t trivial on their own, let alone combined) and good coordination. Bows are more effective the closer you are, so to get the most out of your arrows, you’ll want to close in, but then you also need to wheel off again without your riders getting in each other’s way, so you needed to drill maneuvers for that.

So you either need to have a sufficiently large body of soldiers with the leisure to train both archery and riding instead of working the fields, or you needed a society that treats them as basic skills anyway and only needed training in the military application. Nomadic peoples like the Scythians or Mongols often had the former, so they were notable sources of dangerous mounted archery, particularly where the raising and support of a professional army wasn’t feasible. Rome had the Equites Sagitarii, but they were part of the distinct social class we would call Knights, so not your rank-and-file soldier (and those were already more professional than later levy- or retinue-based militaries).

So if we were concerned about accuracy*, these units should be expensive and require good management to make the most of them, but be very dangerous too. The point about open / closed terrain certainly fits as well.

What’s a bit more foggy is how games usually handle bow effectiveness at range, but that’s its own topic.

*I do care about accuracy, but not at any cost - games need to be fun too, and that’s worth sacrificing some accuracy for.

If you don’t pay for late checkout, you can’t check out late. If you don’t pay for the DLC, you can’t play the DLC. You can still check out at the normal time (which is the basic service) or play the base game, respectively.

Dammit, EAC may be an issue on Linux though. It’s kinda hit or miss whether a given developer will take the extra steps, particularly given the conflicting sources on just how complex it actually is. According to Valve, it’s a checkbox and dropping a file in your depot. Others claim it would require an Epic Online Services version of EAC, with all the baggage that carries, including potentially rewriting a whole chunk of your code.

It’s like booking a hotel: Basic price will get you a room for the night, with all the common amenities, but if you want late checkout, you’ll pay extra. Sure, they could fold that into the basic price and make it the norm, but if you know you’ll leave early anyway, you’ll be paying for something you don’t want.

The metaphor breaks apart if you look too closely - for hotels, early checkout is a convenience since they can get the room ready sooner for the next guest, so they’ll incentivise that, while the devs have already put in the work. On the other hand, the late checkout is a service of convenience while a DLC is an excitement feature, where the content is instead an incentive to pay more.

Either way, I feel like add-ons for games aren’t too different from add-ons in many other industries: “This is the basic <thing>, with the price we feel we can charge for it. This here is an extra you can have for an extra charge.”

I recently went and replayed the DLCs of AC3 and Odyssey, which I’d quit for various reasons. Particularly in the case of Odyssey, Open World Fatigue played a role: I couldn’t be arsed to explore everything anymore, but neither could I bear to leave anything open.

I decided to just go for the missions, to not worry about over optimising my choices, to not worry about cleaning out every little question mark and chest and finishing every location. I finished them, enjoyed my time and found new freedom in not having to draw out the maximum amount of game time for my money.