My friends's 'claim to fame' is that he gave a lift to Stewart Copeland to audition a guy for a band he was forming "called The Police". That guy he auditioned was Sting.
I shall be playing HOI4 Black Ice and Witcher 3.
How are you finding HOI4 Black Ice? I tried it out but found it to be a head-scratcher of complexity. Maybe I didn't give it enough time. Is it worth the effort?
It makes for a long game that's to be sure. I don't always want a huge deep game but it's there for when I'd like a three-course steak dinner and not just a Big Mac.
Black Ice is great from an historical point of view. I like the historical divisional structures and expanded battalions. The events system is good and the historical reinforcements are great. I usually always play as the UK and once tried Nazi Germany which seemed to have LOTS more depth. I also enjoy the slower pace though I don't care much for the expanded Construction tech tree (I think it's mainly useless). I also think having to keep tabs on dozens of material for divisional upkeep a bit tedious but you get used to it.
BlackIce feels like a pretty huge disappointment to me, after having loved it in HOI3. If ever a mod suffered from 'feature creep', it's BlackIce. It's just too much -- as evidenced by all the contortions the designers go through to try to cram their ideas into the existing UI with extra tabs and buttons and windows.
Also the complete lack of aesthetic unity is a big turn off. They haven't done nearly enough to match their vision to Pdox's UI and graphics design (or else come up with a new one ... not that that would be easy). Too many elements look cut and pasted from other formats and sources. A mod like DiDay's Common Units shows how UI/graphical unity can be done -- though admittedly the scale of DiDay's mod is a lot smaller.
I wish I had some real modding skills, as I have in mind something like what I'd consider to be an ideal mod for HOI4. Primary concern: realistic OOBs and division templates. (If there's one thing I do like about BlackIce, it's their efforts in this area.) Fewer but more much more robust divisions overall (AI division spam remains a huge problem). Overhauled Naval combat -- no more preposterous AI doomstack fleets. Submarine warfare that actually bears some resemblance to WW2. Much more realistic modelling of : weather effects (currently negligible -- go ahead and launch that huge invasion in the dead of winter -- makes no difference); supply/logisitics; unit morale.
What kills me about HOI4 is that I feel it's already *almost* there -- *almost* the perfect Pdox WW2 game. But the part of me that wishes the game were just a bit more groggy, with better attention to historical detail and reality -- without going over the deep end in BlackIce fashion -- that's the mod I wish I could make.