New Gaming Laptop

[puddleduck]

Ah yeah maybe it does end actually heh.

You have to get out of the Civ mindset of sitting behind the safety of your walls and amassing an army that's ready to steamroller everything. It was a time of expansion and conquest, so you gotta go take what you want Eventually leading to you taking Rome of course (I always thought you could make an excellent Pope)

I definitely find my family members start to get worse as the inbreeding picks up haha

 

[Sedition]

Need to change the thread title to "A Yarn with Puddleduck". All the information about laptops will be ancient by next week anyways

I've tossed the Alexander campaign aside for now. The time limit meant you really couldn't stand still at all, and family members weren't being produced that often. I only had 6 governors for my 10-12 cities in the last game I played. Being an expansion pack, I think it's aimed at more experienced players.

I realised I needed to use another .exe to access the base game with the starting campaigns, so I'm into that now. The family members to cities ratio seems to be reversed, around 12 of them across my 5 cities, so I'm liking that.

Can't believe I've had this game for awhile and didn't realise how good it is I'm still playing it like Civ though

 

[puddleduck]

Haha yeah that sounds right It's been so long, and I've been through so many other campaigns and other "total wars" so to speak they've blurred into one bloodified (or should that be field heh) mess of bodies

Yeah all the expansion packs are definitely for when you've got a feel for the game, much more fast paced action packed games.

I did seem to remember being able to take my time a bit in the proper long game with my units slowly upgrading from standard peasants and basic troops to special legionaries who fight to the death and never rout regardless. Always amusing when a battle has gone tits up and you watch them dying one by one heh close up haha

You should find the early battles on this campaign are all fairly winnable affairs, but like you say, it's so easy to play it in Civ style and still be awesome. 12 family members is much better Get some of them buggers breeding and you could have 30-40 of them in quick time

So who've you started with this time? The green roman guys? I'm sure they were my favourites and sure they were called the scippi. The beauty of them was as you conquered all the port towns in that little patch of ocean your trade would go through the roof with tons of little boats all filling the trade routes and bringing in more money to fund the steady march of organised death

Then... one day... when Rome asks you once to many times to go and kill blahdiblah for them, you turn your armies around and claim it for your rightful self

 

[Sedition]

I went with the red guys, Julii I think. I'll probably check the others out eventually.

I'm so lazy with building my navy in this and Civ. In Civ I'll have like 1 or 2 caravels for transport and nothing else until I can build destroyers and battleships. I read that the sea trades provide a shedload of gold in Rome though, so I'm starting to work on that.

I thought you were joking about the inbreeding, but I just noticed the family tree tab and it looks to be going on I was wondering why the daughters hadn't been bringing potentials home lately.

 

[puddleduck]

The Julii are cool as well I actually think I might have been the Brutii? Anyway, just avoid the one's on the island. Stupid Mt Etna

Navy in civ was awesome (I was normally the British though). You always get some kind of bonus if you go all the way around the world first with a boat to movement, so that coupled with the great lighthouse and/or colossus normally meant...

B5..

I sunk your battleship. In Civ 5 the navy is immense since you can bombard towns from sea.

Haha some of those women may be daughters, and some of the men do just marry of their own accord. Keep an eye on the traits though, they develop some crackers in amongst the context sensitive ones. Nothing more annoying than a general who only gives you daughters. I want men dammit! Men to lead my armies!

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Oh and topic wise (you know, so I don't force you to mod me haha)

They've just released the newest Geforce desktop card...

It's two 680s in one card with water cooling built in...

 

[Sedition]

I think the Brutii were the green guys. They were killed off by the Macedonians and a gladiator uprising already in my game. I've just finished wiping out the Gauls and have been taking potshots at the Macedons as they send numerous armies towards my cities. I trained all my spies and assassins up by executing every diplomat that wanders into my territory, so the generals don't stand a chance

No updates on the p4laptops site I'm using to build my machine, but Dell has had an overhaul of their Alienware models on the Australian site.

Now offering:
3rd Generation Intel processor
Dual hard drives (minimum 256gb SSD and 5400RPM SATA )
Standalone 675M graphics card only

All for the low price of $5000

I guess it'll take a few months for the dual 680's to make their way here, since the 675's are just starting to appear. I'll have to keep playing the waiting game for a little while longer it seems.

 

[Papa_Smurf]

I'm thinking of getting a gaming laptop. But my knowledge of all this techno mumbo-jumbo is zilch.

Why are you getting dual graphic cards, Sediton? Is it just to reduce cpu usage? And what's more important - more ram or a better cpu processor?

 

[Sedition]

My main motivation for the dual cards is that you really can't upgrade the graphics card in laptops when it becomes dated and I want this machine to last me awhile. They don't blow the price out too much (extra $450 for dual) compared to going for other high end components like the cpu or hard drive, which can add thousands to the price.

Not too sure about the RAM vs. CPU, but if you had 8gb+ RAM, then adding more probably won't do much, whereas a better CPU would help.

Are you planning on customising or buying one off the shelf? What kind of price range?

 

[puddleduck]

If you want to build a gaming laptop, I'd suggest you don't need much more than a 3rd generation i5 processor that's paired with 8gb or ram and then the best gfx card you can afford. If you can get a single Gt 675x you should be good to go with a decent i5 processor and 8gb of ram. The processor is important, but it's more important for things like processing obviously (programming, architectural design etc... ) Those are the moments when you're likely to have multiple tasks running all taxing a processor.

For a dedicated gaming laptop, where you aren't attempting to future proof for the future big games like sedition, then the gfx card will be most important as when being used for the gaming side it's the gfx card that will be most taxed. Ram is ram, and the more the better but you wouldn't want less than 8 and 8 should be enough really.

 

[Sedition]

I thought the processor had a decent role in gaming, but I am rather ignorant about what it actually does - central processing unit just sounds important.

From my research over the past week or two, I'd say puddleduck's nailed the basic specs you're looking at for something reasonably priced and can easily handle today's games.

It may infact be the best option, since in my situation where I'm looking at paying $3500 for something on the higher end, I'm basically paying top dollar for hardware that isn't being fully utilised right now, and by the time it is, there's already a slew of better technology on the market for around the $2000 mark.

 

[puddleduck]

It does on some games, for example Skyrim sticks quite a lot on the processor to allow for mid-range graphics card to still be able to play it on the lower settings. A well optimised game will use it all cleverly, but most poorly optimised games will just ask the GPU to do everything.

I have an i7 sandy bridge and I love it because even if something crashes the cpu is still fine meaning it's always software related and I can just alt-ctrl-del and instantly close whatever the issue is. If I could rebuild it though, I'd have saved some money on the processor and got a good i5 and put a better gfx card in as that's where you'll see the most differences in frames per second

What Sedition has typed is essentially what I learnt after I built mine haha

 

[angryangy]

New Clevos are in. Clevo Horize – Logical Blue One

I must say the ultraportable W110ER is really tempting.

 

[Sedition]

I stumbled on that site at one point in my travels, but the few models I clicked on didn't allow customising. On a second look, quite a few actually can be customised.

The ones I've thrown together have come out to around $2800, though none offer the dual 675's yet. I'll have to keep an eye on them, they might be able to save me a few hundred with a <3GHz processor.

The W110ER does indeed look a pretty sweet deal.

 

[ved_]

One word. Alienware. It PWNS.

 

[puddleduck]

Have you actually read the thread Zhu?


If you want to contribute something useful, fair enough, but if you want to tell us that the laptop company we've ruled out very early on for being overpriced, underspecced, and excessively tacky "Pwns" then by all means make yourself look a prat haha