Just finished a Hard game with the Darloks where I kept at least 1.2% to espionage at all times. Was great fun and made a couple interesting observations.

*There might be a universal diplomatic penalty for spying success. On two occasions, I got war declarations from a race after I successfully spied on another. The first were the Bulrathi, who were neutral with me, and declared after I stole a tech from the Meklar, with whom I was at war. Later on, the Meklars did the same after I blew up some Bulrathi bases, although relations were pretty tense at that point after our previous war. I was at war with both targets at the time, and wasn't aware enough of before/after spy totals to know if they had been caught. Don't know if there is anything to this, but I thought it was a heck of a coincidence.

*The Mrrshan were relegated to their homeworld the entire game, so I decided to have some fun with propaganda. Well, that turned into decimation. I don't know why, but after I got a few rebels on the planet, their pollution level quickly went to the max, and pop started dying. This happened before the revolution. Once the revolt happened, the Kitty leader changed personas, and all the rebels went away (as evidenced by my next hit). However, the kitties never recovered from that, and eventually ended up with 10 pop on their homeworld, leaving 180 factories to rust. My only thinking is that the rebels didn't contribute to the production, and their missile base/ship maintainance sucked up all their spending, though I relieved them of the base spending soon after the revolt I've just never seen a race implode like that in MOO. They weren't at war through their economic demise until they were already down to like 15 pop or something ridiculous like that, and never attacked until I put them out of their misery.

Quick unrelated question: Do the AI races suffer from the same trade penalty as the player?

dathon

Greetings from your favorite ancient dragon who's name has now come to be synonymous with fish-bait!

I thought I would take the proverbial bull by the horns and try to get stuff going. As was discussed in the other topic, it was generally agreed that everyone would like to have more guild events, and Friday seems to be the best day for everyone.

To be fair to our members from across the pond, we'll have each event twice per day, once at 9:00 pm GMT (4PM East Coast US, 1PM West Coast US),* and then again at 5:00 am GMT (12 midnight East, 9PM West),* which is technically the next morning, but whatever. I think these times will work for everyone, judging by what people have said thus far.

I didn't call the topic "Challenge Night" or whatever because we can use it for other events than challenges, such as an unrated GvG match once people get comfortable with that or whatever else we might want to do (finally clearing that Dunes of Despair bonus, for example).

Common consensus thus far has been for a full clearing of the Underworld, so we'll pencil that one in for this Friday. I hope to see everyone there!

* I'm pretty sure I've got the time conversions correct, but if not, oops.

Check it out here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=147051

I elected to give a choice for start location. Please make your selection!

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=146665

See all of you there

-Maniac

PS: Zed, whenever you decide on the theme for OSG7, go ahead and launch the game so we can, hopefully, complete it in '05.

8)

Still a lot to do to get her ready for battle, but... the ship has left port!

Hi,

I hope I won't bore you to tears with my single player reports, but all this "Adventure One Starts Next Week!" stuff from someone's sig had made me kind of restless...

So I played my first emperor game with raging barbs on the Highlands map, space and culture disabled. Had a great time! If you like to read about it, I've posted a report on my site.

-Kylearan

www.gogamer.com is currently having one of their 48 hr sales, and Civ 4 DVD edition is on their list being sold at 35$

It is displaying 28$ for me, since I've subscribed to their email list (free to subscribe of course).

Well, there you go. Small window of time to get buy a bargain if you haven't already picked up Civ 4. If any other deals for Civ 4 pop up, feel free to reply here.

Ok people. Start making suggestions. I think we have enough people here that can handle one game at a time and keep playing, so my suggestion is this:

Suggest away, and if we get more varients than any sane person could fit into one game, we'll split them into 2 or 3 games one at a time? sound good?

- Maniac

Apologies at the getgo, this is going to be a long post.

Ok, so I'm starting to get a bit disheartened with the fact that I hardly ever see anyone on anymore, as guild activity has really dropped off since the end of the summer. I know a lot of that is because people are working full time, going to school full time, or a combination of the two. Last month I was probably able to play a combined grand total of 10 hours because there was a lot going on. There's going to be a lot going on again for the next couple weeks as I've got 4 take home final exams to do, all of which involve about a 5+ page paper (well, one class is likely to be 2 3 page papers), not something I'm looking forward too (seriously, I hate take home exams). Anyways... I'm not trying to blame anyone, nor am I trying to whine/yell at people. I'm just saying that we need better organization.

Up until now we've really been loosely organized, everyone's an officer, members come and go (either they leave the guild or stop playing altogether), and during the summer it worked great: ad hoc groups galore and there was generally at least 3-4 people online at a given time to do something with. I don't think that's going to work anymore, especially with Christmas right around the corner. The last time I was actually able to make nudist night, I remember Seijin making a comment something along the lines of him not seeing that many people on at once; when we had 8 people on. Really, compared to the summer, that's nothing. I can remember when I could press the key to bring up the guild roster and it would be full, and I could scroll down to the non-officers (people we hadn't promoted yet) and there would be several of them on at once as well. Which brings me back to my starting point that hardly anyone is on anymore. Even when I sign on around midnight (EST), I'm lucky if Xyn, WarBlade or KoP are on.

This is a bit of a problem for a couple reasons. First off, it's discouraging for existing members because I know there are a lot of times when we'd like to "get some guild action" going, to use a phrase of Cy's, but there's no one around to do so. It's also a recruitment problem since people generally want an active guild. That one's not as much of a problem though, the general population is, like it is in D2, less than stellar, to put it mildly. But it is the reason some people have joined for a week or so and then just left.

Back to point #2, we're not that organized. Aside from the scheduled nudist nights, we don't have any way of knowing when or if something will be going on with the guild, which I think is part of the reason people sign on very infrequently. When people do sign on, everybody's generally off doing their own thing, so it's hard to get a group going unless you're willing to wait around for a half hour or so while people finish what they're doing.

So, what do we do about this? Well, I can think of a few suggestions. First off, we should have an alternate way of getting in touch with each other. Either ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, or whatever some other real-time messenger service is. Currently, the only person's AIM buddy name I have is Drasca's, so if anyone else has one, post it up. I only have AIM right now, but installing something else isn't a problem, unless it's MSN messenger (I really don't like Microsoft products). This is an easy way to see who's online and if they're available for anything, or if they even want to do anything.

Another suggestion is to have more scheduled meeting times. Not that we have to have something specific planned out, but just having a general time when you know that other guild members will be online to do something. Even if only 5-6 people are able to show up, that's still better than 1 or 2 people signing on and doing solo work, with another person or two signing on and then signing back off because there aren't any guild groups doing anything and they don't have any real solo work of their own to get through.

A third alternative is to join a guild alliance, like the ULGG (I think that's what it's called, something like the United Legit Gaming Guilds). I have no idea what they require as far as membership goes or if that's something we even want to do. We could also just try making alliances with single guilds. There's a semi-direct connection with us to the Amazon Basin (some of us are active also in the Lurker Lounge, which, through D2, is fairly closely associated with the Basin), so that might be something to look into. I'm a bit hesitant to do that myself, since the past few times I've tried to contact members they've given me the 'cold shoulder' (I'm fairly certain one of them has me on an ignore list because I said "hello"). But, whatever, guild alliances are a possibility, we just need someone to coordinate that.

This brings me to point #3, we lack coordination/structure. I'm not suggesting that we establish a heirarchy, we just need a few people to make arrangements, plan guild events, etc.. For example, we could have a guild party in the guild hall, or hire one of the performance guilds out there to give us a private screening of a play or something (yeah, it sounds a little silly, but I was trying to think of stuff to have/do). Then there's the whole PvP thing. Very few of us are actively involved in PvP and several people, like myself, have probably only done PvP to get chars out of pre-searing. I can't speak for them, but I'd imagine some of the people in the guild who do like to pvp are a little discouraged by not having guildmates to do Team Arenas, GvG or attempt to take the HoH with. Kathrys of Ascalon (not sure about his original/real name anymore, if he ever had one other than that) left the guild for that exact reason.

Speaking from experience, it's very hard to do anything without organization and get people to show up. A great many organizations have died out because of a lack of structure, coordination and organization. I would hate for RBGW to join them. RBCiv has epics, RBD2 has the variant teams, and I've even seen some things going on over at RBGC and RBMoO. While we won't be able to have as many variant builds as there are for D2 due to the constrictions placed by ANet on the number of chars per account, I'm sure we can work something out with already existing chars (i.e. trying something where we go through all missions at level 20, but start with 0 in all attribures and can only raise one attribute by 1 level after we beat a mission, not necessarily going in order).

I think that's everything I wanted to say for now. I'm sorry for bringing up a subject so gloomy and dragging on for so long, but I just felt that these things needed to be said. I remember signing on back in April the first day GW was available to pre-order people and being surprised that I was still in the guild. Had I known how to at the time, I probably would have left the guild, but I didn't, so I stuck with it. The only person in the guild I was even acquainted with was Drasca since, because of a topic on the Lurker Lounge, I had gamed with him a couple times during the BWEs. However, he hardly signed on at the beginning, and I don't think I saw him at all the first few weeks after the game was out. The other people in the guild were warm and welcoming, and helped me through pre-searing and into the seared world of Ascalon, which was completely new to me, as the last time I had played was during the January BWEs that pre-dated pre-searing. After a week or so of just sticking with it, I came to like the people in the guild, and felt like I could ask people for help, talk about aspects of the game such as skills, etc.. Now, I look forward to hanging out with the guild, even if we don't do anything other than chat in the guild window. What I'm basically trying to say is that RBGW has given a lot to me, and, at the risk of getting mushy, I like you guys. I'd like to be able to give something back.

Wow, big words for me!

Anyway, I was looking for a good and free program to edit screenshots. So I had a couple of questions.

1) the Civ ini file lets you set the format of screenshots. I have mine as JPG right now. Is there a better format for size/quality?

2) if you use or know of a good and free editor ... what is it? :drool: