We have our first barbarian warrior. At the moment he can only enter our borders to attack or pillage on the first turn. It means that our worker moves to chop the forest 1W of the stone instead of one of those northern forests, and our warrior will move to cover the forest with a road next turn. With luck the barb just moves away but I'm glad we're whipping our first axe in a couple of turns. I left the selected warrior unmoved, but I'm inclined to move him back to the grass hill. Other options are north to scout the coast for a city or NE to peep at William, let me know what you think.
Good news and bad news - the good news is that the barb warrior moved away! So our stonehenge micro can continue unmolested. We whip the axe next turn and chop it out eot50. The highlighted fogbusting warrior could head south soon to make sure the coast is clear for the silver city when that gets founded.
The bad news is that OT4E looks like he's planning to settle the plains hill on t50 or 51, depending which recent whip was the settler. Now our settler will be on the move and end up NW of marble next turn, so on t50 we could settle ON the marble and invalidate his city site if we play before OT4E. Except that that's a poor city and we now think we're in a settling race (even without having seen his settler) so we should play after him for the next couple of turns. If a settler appears on the hill by t50 then we'll move ours to 1N of marble and settle t51. If no settler appears by t50 then we move 1E of marble and settle t51. I wish I'd played about an hour earlier this turn.
Also in the picture is our new city, Dragon Age (did I get the right edition?) Highlighted is William's warrior who might have just killed a lion. We'll get an axe or two in here sharpish as an AGG neighbour tends to cause worry. Especially when he settled his third city this turn, presumably for copper. I'm now pretty sure he didn't build a barracks in his capital, so I've no idea what caused his 3000 soldier point rise on t44 - he didn't do anything to cause land points on t24 so the 6 score points he got must be a tech and not a combination of land and pop which could have explained it. this is very annoying.
Demos and power - nice flat graphs from both our neighbours
William seems to be upset about something. Those are two shock warriors (William has a barracks in TBD now), one thankfully injured to 84HP. His first warrior gets 30% attacking Dragon Age, the second gets 65%. It may be worth the gamble for him, but to win both fights is only 20%...
I've whipped the axe in Col - it can cover the worker if needed next turn then be in Dragon Age t51, unfortunately we're playing second and William's second warrior will have attacked just before that. We're tempted to put the overflow from the whip into axes instead of 'Henge, but at this point we think 'Henge is worth more to us than Dragon Age.
If William whips an axe from tbd next turn then it can attack us on t53. If we overflow from stonehenge into an axe and whip it t52 it'll get to DA second half of t54.
On the OT4E front the bear frightened my warrior away, so we're not sure if it'll be possible to settle either site the turn after next...
First, an introduction and an explanation. I’m the (in)famous Hitru’s wife lurking this game. This is my first time lurking the RB forums. I have played Civ, but on a very casual level compared to the games played here. However, I’m greatly enjoying lurking this game, learning quite a bit and looking forward to when I can actually discuss it with Hitru. Hitru asked me to write an introduction about Dragon Age, the game behind your latest city. We’ve both played the Dragon Age games, but they’ve always been closer to my heart, so I was happy to oblige. (Let’s hope you’ll be keeping the city!)
***
Dragon Age is a role-playing video game series by Bioware. The setting is pretty traditional dark fantasy. The first installment of the series, Dragon Age: Origins, came out in 2009 and its two sequels, Dragon Age II and Dragon Age: Inquisition, were released in 2011 and 2014.
Dragon Age: Origins was a nod to old party-based RPGs such as Baldur’s Gate. It received much praise, and even though its combat mechanics now feel a bit clunky, its characters, setting and story are still exceptional. In Origins, the story is your classic fantasy save-the-world story arch, but its many side quests and great characters make it anything but boring. What gives the game its unique flavor is that you select your character origin from six different backgrounds, and who you are reflects to the story all the way. You can grab it for really cheap now, so if you’re looking for something to play, I still highly recommend DA:O.
In Dragon Age II, you play a character of a set background, an immigrant to a city of Kirkwall, who then rises to be its hero. Dragon Age: Inquisition presents the player with an open background and a more classic save-the-world story.
For me, Dragon Age is one of my favorite video game series, second only to The Elder Scrolls games. I’ve sunk a good 200+ hours into Origins, and probably some 100+ hours on the sequels. Even though the faster development and modifications for console players are evident in the sequels, I still highly recommend the whole series. The feel and replayability of Origins is unmatched, and the story and engaging characters are what make the sequels great games.
Hi Katinka! We'll do our best to keep the city - see below...
Turn 50 pt 1
Good news and bad news - William pulled back, meaning we don't face a 20% chance of losing dragon age, but he also has a size 3 border city with a barracks and granary which should be able to whip out quite the army of shock axes once he hooks copper...
Also there's a barb warrior incoming.
I won't log back in until OT4E plays, but this should give us some food for thought until then.
The Stonehenge build goes ahead as planned, but rather than overflowing into a worker we'll put the hammers into an axe and whip it soon. I switched Dragon Age to a spear after this pic - it'll be whippable in four turns if we're feeling nervous. William got a tech last turn that I hope wasn't Animal Husbandry. The selected axe will either defend against the barb warrior or kill it if it moves to the sheep. We'll have three axes and two warriors in DA by t54, hopefully that's enough to deter William, but Shock axes will get ~70% on our axes even when they're fully fortified. We could research Archery next (3 turns) for Archers that get similar odds on defence but cost 10 hammers less and defend well vs chariots. Or Animal Husbandry for chariots to hit his axes before they attack. Or we could build walls? We're saving cash on Animal Husbandry this turn, decision to be made next turn.
I offered white peace on the off-chance that he'd go for it.
On the OT4E front the settler scouted the area and OT would have beaten us to the marble site on turn order even without the bear, so we'll settle north of the marble next turn and hope that he's happy with that border and with us fighting William. The new city provides a trade route to Baldur's Gate and thus gems to all our other cities.
Hitru thought we might be able to decipher whether William's third city (t48) was settled on copper from the MFG graph. Good luck! I think the most recent power increase was the barracks that got built eot48. Demos included free of charge.
Katinka has thoroughly summed up Dragon Age, but I felt I ought to put my own spin on the series, while waiting nervously to see what can go wrong next with the PB...
Game: Dragon Age (series)
Released: 2009-2014
First played: 2010
(Highly) Personal rating: You get to kill Janeway to impress Aeryn Sun. Let me repeat that: you get to kill Janeway to impress Aeryn Sun. Awesome.
This game pretty much prevented me throwing my PS3 out of the window. Having owned a PlayStation, and a PS2, I bought the PS3 in order to play a newly released RPG. It was a gross disappointment (and may appear later in these write-ups). But I caught a review of DA: Origins somewhere and decided to give it a try. I pretty much got the value out of the PS3 just for the number of times I played this one game.
As I said about Baldur's Gate, my usual pattern with RPGs is to play through once at speed, either grinding or turning the difficulty down if necessary, then again with the aid of a nice, fat guidebook to get close to completion. If I like the game I'll probably come back to it once or twice more. I've played Origins through eight or nine times, I think. So yes, I liked this game a lot. Some of this may have been because I had not been exposed previously to Bioware's games - if I'd been familiar with some of the mechanics ("moral" choices, balancing the superficially contradictory agendas of your party) it might have had less impact.
As Katinka said, it's highly replayable. First, there are choices in starting background: you get one of six starts, each of which is only distinct for an hour or so before starting the main storyline, but with lots of nice little touches scattered throughout the game that are different depending on who you are and what you chose to do. Second, you get a rich choice of class and specialisation. This is a protagonist centred game, and you tend to end up more advanced than your team-mates as you get ahead of them in levels and pick up bonuses they are denied. The good thing about this is how you build your main character changes the play and affects which party characters you spend most time with, which makes the game feel different. Third, you get distinct choices as to how to achieve your objectives. You can play like some honourable hero or you can slaughter half the country (including your own team-mates if they object) while grabbing every piece of dark power you can to boost your capability to win.
Personally, I found most of the voice acting and dialog to be excellent, not getting tired even on multiple playthroughs (although, OK, Claudia Black and Kate Mulgrew could be considered "stunt casting"), and I enjoyed the gameplay. It was the first time I really had to get to grips with the "tank, DPS, support" model and it took me a little while, but I did like the way that you (normally) cleared parts of the game as you progressed, and could use bottlenecks and terrain, or even sometimes disengage completely and come back to finish off particularly awkward large groups of foes.
But, above all, I am a sucker for story and world-building, and Dragon Age has this in spades. The writers have used a lot of the standard fantasy tropes (and that can be a complete blocker for some people), but they've put them together in new ways, and there are even some bits of the world that feel genuinely original (particularly as they focus on the Qunari in the sequel). They tie themselves in knots slightly and there are some bits of the history that don't quite fit together or make sense, but the same is true of Tolkien. Above all, they've put together a supporting mix of races, creeds and identities that are a rich source of narrative conflict, without either making too many divisions into clear "bad" and "good" or falling into the trap of so much "dark fantasy" of just making everyone either competent or pointlessly nasty and miserable (looking at you, Joe Abercrombie). You can't fix everything in the game world, certainly not without costs, but you can make some things better. The first game does suffer a bit from the main arc being a the standard "save the world from mindless, non-negotiable evil", but even the Darkspawn get a little depth as the story develops. As a threat, they are also enough to plausibly justify grabbing and using all that dark power - not all characters or organisations in the game world will see it that way, but it's a view the game supports.
That said, my favourite part of the series is the first act of the sequel. You're not saving the world; just trying to make a living (albeit a violent, not necessarily legal one) as a refugee in a strange land. Later you end up having to tackle bigger issues, trying - and largely failing - to save your city and family, but for a while you are just a guy (or lady) hanging about making money and hitting the pub with your mates at the end of the day (well, the more socially balanced ones - the runaway demon mage and the whiny mutilated killer elf prefer to stay home and brood, which they do very well).
The sequel loses some of the mechanical rough edges of the first game (hey - you can tell your characters where to move to, rather than having to take control and run them one at a time out of the firestorm!); it's also much less brown than the original, with actual sunshine (the best lit part of the first game is the dwarven underground city!). However, the gameplay has been sped up and made to feel less tactical - enemies now just "pop" into existence through walls as a matter of course, rather than that being a rare, unpleasant surprise. It retains a lot of the replayability of the first game, but doesn't have the different backgrounds. It's also geographically much more limited, to a single city state and it's environs, with some parts "randomised" in ways that feel repetitive and gamey. What it does have is that choices you made in the first game carry forward into the history of the world in the second. One of the reasons I kept replaying the original was to set things up in particular ways to play the second game.
So, I was really looking forward to the third part - Inquisition. It picked up on parts of the storyline I wanted to explore further, brought back characters I cared about, expanded into new parts of the world and looked stunning. So why did I never finish it? I'm not sure - there's no one big thing. It's partly that it's just too large a game. There's too much time-filling fetch-questing going on; I'm normally OK with this, but Inquisition passed through some sort of barrier where it wasn't interesting any more. The combat mechanics never quite made sense to me. I like choices, but felt that the "who's going to die?" at end of the Grey Warden sequence was too on-the-nose. I was also disappointed that in order to set up the world the way you wanted to or to get a full "manual" to help with a playthrough you had to go online and sign up for things. Meh. Pain in the neck on a PS3 - I've got a spare USB keyboard around here somewhere, but it was just too much hassle, and felt like a privacy and security risk (not a big one, but still an issue). So, somewhere around an annoying, timed floor puzzle which I found a pain to do with a PS3 controller I dropped it. Possibly because I decided to take PC strategy gaming more seriously at just about that time...
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
What went wrong next: Dreylin won a coin-flip for Stonehenge, which means we need to figure out some other way of popping our borders. We didn't get any failgold as the production hadn't been applied, so we've got a shiny new granary instead. Could be worse I suppose. Given that we could have finished the 'Henge a turn earlier without waiting for Masonry, save ourselves some beakers and not infuriate our AGG neighbour I wonder if we'll look at turn 48 (when we settled Dragon age) as the point everything went wrong in this game.
William didn't take peace and now has a road, but I'm sure he doesn't have Animal Husbandry. Hopefully. We can whip a spear in three turns, then we'll get hammers into the walls so that they can be whipped, should a force of axes turn up. Colonization has an axe temporarily, after killing the barb warrior he'll move on join the gang in Dragon Age too.
This warrior spawned on the only possible tile last turn, and could cause us some trouble. I've tested and if I move the warrior to the forest hill this turn the barb will bypass him and pillage our gems, whereas if I move to the hill next turn it will attack at 3%. We'll put some hammers into yet another axe in the mean time, which will complete in time if the barb should win the first battle, but can be left in the queue instead if not.
With our 2 axes we're top of the power charts. But William got a lot of power points recently too. I'm expecting to see an axe from him very soon.
And as Elite has finally appeared in an actual screenshot in the thread (shame that the news of its founding has been kind of swamped by ... other things ), I get to talk about it.
Elite is an open-ended, spaced-based simulation of trading and combat. You start as a fresh pilot, rated "Harmless", with your Cobra Mk III armed trader carrying a single pulse laser and three of your four missile tubes full. You can't afford a fourth missile, because you need all your handful of credits to buy cargo. If you choose wisely, you can jump to another system, sell the cargo for enough to cover your fuel costs, buy a better cargo, and maybe, maybe, start saving for that fourth missile. And a real gun. And better shields. And ECM to protect you from other ships' missiles. And an escape pod for when your reflexes, shields, ECM and guns aren't enough to save you...
Oh, and a docking computer. Because your real enemies in the early game are the space stations that you need to dock with in order to sell your cargo and buy all this lovely stuff. They have a narrow docking bay that spins temptingly slowly but not quite slowly enough. You can survive warp and pirate attacks to die very easily through bad parking .
But then, when you have a real gun and enough cash, you can do what you damn well like. Hang around in spacelanes looking for fat, slow Anaconda freighters to blow apart and pick through rather than buying your own cargo; just look out for the escorts, and the police. Visit the local Anarchy worlds, looking for - and finding - trouble . Bounties can pay well, and it's much faster to rack up the kills that way if you're good enough. Or just keep shuttling computers and furs between safe Rich Industrial and Poor Agricultural worlds to be able to afford an even better gun and even better shields, so you can one day rack up enough kills to reach the final ranking - "Elite".
I never actually managed to get to Elite myself (Deadly with a few "Right on Commander" progress messages is as far as I got), but started this game over and over and over. Even although I had to load it from tape, and then load my profile, again from tape, and save my progress back to - you guessed it - tape. Between that and the real-time musical docking computer sequence having no shortcut on the C64 version, I got through a lot of paperback sci-fi novels while "playing" this game. Probably good for my eyes and back.
Alternatively, I could spend the time just settling back and flipping through the manual, or the accompanying novella "The Dark Wheel". The manual is a part of the Elite world, full of descriptions of how the police work, the history of ship designs and little stories about the strange things that you might just come across in odd corners of the eight galaxies if you live long enough. None of this actually helps with the game (or is even actually in the game in some cases), but it all works to build the world in the players head. The novella, by the usually rather serious novelist Robert Holdstock, is a well-written story that gives an even firmer platform from which the imagination can jump off. Meld that with the open world gameplay and the wide-open star maps and you somehow had something more than just a computer game.
Some of this is nostalgia, some of this is the awe I feel now when I realise how much effort and genius went into packing so much into an 8-bit game that had to fit into less than 64k of RAM. The graphics are lined based, but you can tell what is going on. The sounds are simple but well chosen - the horrible screech as lasers stop bouncing off your shields and start eating into your hull, telling you that had only seconds to do something special to keep living, is particularly effective. The UI is a masterpiece of design, presenting all the key information clearly without clutter. It even manages to provide an effective 3D view of the locations of other ships on the sensor screen. The designers of the Civ VI UI should probably be made to play this game for a while...
The game also makes the smart decision to tell realism to go take a running jump where gameplay or immersion would otherwise suffer. No spaceship will ever fly like this one, with the banking turns, acceleration and deceleration, but it's intuitive and fun. The sequels and later clones lost some of simplicity, to no great effect. I remember playing a derivative on the Archimedes that actually modeled relativistic time dilation as you flew. I like Special Relativity, and consider it a thing of almost unparalled beauty. I don't want to have to consider it when I'm playing a game.
Yes, there are flaws and peculiarities. Once you get up to having bought all the good kit, it's a repetitive grind to keep getting the kills. In the original, you get to buy weapons and shields that are much better than anything you'll see on other ships in normal flight, making everything but the most badly outnumbered fights easy. While there are missions, they're few and far between, easy to miss and don't actually seem to mean much in terms of reward. The procedurally generated planets add a lot of flavour, but the individual elements start to repeat quite quickly ("goat soup") and even a ten-year old realises soon that they don't actually matter in the game.
But none of this is important. As I've said, I am a sucker for story, and particularly for games that let me feel I am writing the story. Elite does that very well indeed. The basic gameplay remains fun - I've spent quite a while playing the free, open source remake "Oolite". Yes, they've updated the graphics (line mode is available as an option). Yes, they've tweaked the AI behaviour (for the better, actually). Yes, the community has made a plethora of "add-ons" that include new ships, new missions, new equipment (and a bunch of stuff that was mentioned in the manual but didn't exist). But the core of it is still there, unchanged.
Except for the fact that they seem to have allowed other spaceships to equip the best guns and shields as a matter of course. So I still haven't made it to Elite . Had loads of fun though!
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
We're tempted to put the overflow from the whip into axes instead of 'Henge, but at this point we think 'Henge is worth more to us than Dragon Age.
This is my first time lurking the RB forums. I have played Civ, but on a very casual level compared to the games played here. However, I’m greatly enjoying lurking this game, learning quite a bit and looking forward to when I can actually discuss it with Hitru. Hitru asked me to write an introduction about Dragon Age, the game behind your latest city. We’ve both played the Dragon Age games, but they’ve always been closer to my heart, so I was happy to oblige. (Let’s hope you’ll be keeping the city!)
), I get to talk about it.
. 
. Bounties can pay well, and it's much faster to rack up the kills that way if you're good enough. Or just keep shuttling computers and furs between safe Rich Industrial and Poor Agricultural worlds to be able to afford an even better gun and even better shields, so you can one day rack up enough kills to reach the final ranking - "Elite".
. Had loads of fun though!