Too cool to sell

Max Eternal Shield with only 9 Strength requirement.

Very rare Flame Artifact (found by Zyngy)
Nrg +12 (req 12 fire)
Armor +4 (while casting)
Improve Skill Recharge (6%)

Head over to the page to see what they look like

Not the best stats, but hey, You have got to look good.

Jinni is using a plain Eternal Shield over her nice rare shield and the glass long sword from Ascalon.


KoP

Yeah.

I was slogging my way through the Arid Sea for that quest that offers 15 attribute points with my 60% DP (I hate that system), bloody Sand Giants. I was looking for anything, pretty much anything to reduce my DP when I saw a boss name over the horizon, a three-part name beginning with "Rapt", can't really recall the rest.

I hop over the dune and see a giant Dune Lizard, a honking big Dune Lizard monk. There were a few other Dune Lizards around, milling about doing no harm to anyone.

Dune Lizards are harmless little desert critters. How the hell can they have a boss? I look for the boss again and he's vanished. Into the ether.

It was kinda freaky. I saw something incredibly rare, but never got a screenshot or, since I was partying with henchies (Hence the 60% DP), no other eyewitnesses. For anyone curious, I found the boss nearby the foot of the statue that you have to walk over to get to the quest NPC, just before the Sand Wurm.

I think I need to lay off the sauce.

I am going to put up Skills pages. Traditionally, we don't usually host generic game data on our sites, however, I feel we can all benefit by these Skills pages. The pages will list skills with their general descriptions, and also comments from RBers. Some of the skills stock descriptions are cryptic at best and beg for explanations. But more than that, a couple of comments on each skills from RBers' actual playing experiences can help those new and experienced.

All I am looking for is short comments on skills that you think is better than the default description, need more explanation, as well as brief playing tips. You are of course welcome to write a full blown article, but it will only be linked to.

I hope everyone contribute to this effort and learn something new at the same time

PS: Please post your comments under the appropriate sub thread

PS: Can we all please get in the habit of making a title to our posts. Makes it easier to read, track and search for...

KoP

I just figured I should post something, since both the guild message and Zedd reccomended it, so here I am. Admittedly, I am rather late on posting (a week or two), but I also havn't played in that time so I think it evens out.

Hawt Linkage. Discuss, if you like; there is but one reason why I'm posting this.

Wroth Yakslapper

*Sniggers*

From the official updates page.

Update Page Wrote:Update – Thursday, August 11

* Improved traders so that they maintain more stable prices and closer spreads between buy and sell prices.

* Improved traders so that traders from all regions (America, Europe, and Korea) now buy and sell from the same stock and charge the same prices.

I mentioned, in the beginning of my Epic 50 report, that I was taking a break from a different game, one with slightly more...agressive Babylonians. It's an astonishingly fun and interesting game, and so I thought I'd share a few things with y'all.

What has come before is more or less unimportant, save that I'm America, and my goal is (I discover halfway through the game) to conquer the world (apparently unclicked most of the victory conditions...). This is ok, because I've been having gigantic naval wars with the entire world since about 1400 AD, which I'm winning solely because it's destroyers vs. frigates, and I've got the destroyers.

Just before the screenshot I am about to show you, I had a lengthy war with my neighbors, the Aztecs, which ended in their destruction, and a far less lengthy war with my neighbors, the Mayans, which ended in THEIR destruction. I have worked my way across the Atlantic and have invaded Scandanavia, where I am fighting Babylon for possession of the former Viking homeland.

Babylon, as it turns out, is having none of this:



Also there are about 100 more guys in Stockholm, plus random 20 or 50 man stacks of Spanish and Babylonian troops past that.

Now, that's a lot of guys. I have 97 bombers and some arty sitting around, and that helps a lot, but it still takes me about 10 turns of solid blasting to wear down Babylon's enormous stacks (Babylon has over 500 infantry at one point). At this point, I declare peace on the Hittites and Mongols, secure RoPs, and blitz through Spanish Europe.

About the time I finish that and start slogging through Babylon, I pick up modern armor. And it's a good thing I did, because, well, ok. Maybe, in the past, you thought you had a giant war with the AI. Maybe you even thought that me blowing hundreds of Babylonians and Spanish sky high was a pretty impressive war.

Let me assure you that, having witnessed the AI RoP Rape to end all RoP Rapes, I may definitively say that you are wrong.

Behold, the Hittite Army:



Not counting the arty or the 30 or so guys that took down some other stuff, that's 835 Hittites right there. Weighting down my shift key, that took about 15 minutes to move all those guys.

In the interests of fair disclosure, let me note that I DO also have 4 mech inf armies and on order of 12 modern armor armies on this continent, but they're, you know, on the other side of the Hittite Empire. Also 78 bombers and 10 F-15s. So I feel reasonably ok about the whole thing.

But wow.

We all have one, a cutscene that should be quite severe and serious, but turned into something akin a comedy due to an unintentional feature of the game engine, poor voice acting, or some other variable. What's yours?

Mine has to be the final Riverside Province cutscene. We barely scraped to the bridge alive, triggering the cutscene.

First of all; Bledri, my pet, managed an Wile E. Coyote moment as he made it onto the bridge three seconds after it dropped. I scrambled for the print screen key as his little paws trod thin air just to return to my side, but was too slow, alas.

Then it turned out that some of the White Mantle made it across the bridge before Bledri, and proceeded to spend the rest of the cutscene hacking chunks out of one of the party members (fortunately not me) while we had that big ol' chinwag with Evennia. It was hilarious. Had it not been for cutscene invulnerability, he would have died seven times over. I half expected someone in the cutscene to turn to the White Mantle and yell "Hey, will you knock it off!? We're trying to discuss your downfall here!"

Yesterday I started a new character, Me/R Weira Lourdes (So called because I wanted her at the extreme right of the character selection screen, meh) and the time comes after completing every single possible quest available (Including the taster quests for other professions), I'm left with Across the Wall.

So I put out the usual PuG request and get landed with a dainty li'l E/Me. We head to the gate, pop over, and start mashing Oakhearts on our way to Ben Wolfson. We get there in one piece, I pick up Wolfson and start heading back down via the lake route (same way we came in).

One green dot on the compass isn't following me. With mounting dread, I turn around to see what my little pyromancer was doing. She was staring at the Charr warband with interest. I could tell what was going to happen.

One Fire Storm later, and she's got a whole bunch of Charr smashing her. I know from experience that neither I nor my pet can take on a warband of that size (Rurik 'forgot' to follow me on Charr at the Gate). Yet, gosh darn it, I'm such a nice guy that I try my best to make sure she gets out of there alive.

Splat, crunch, snap, I'm dead on the floor. I res at the shrine and try my best to make it back to the area in a desperate effort to make the best out of a horrid situation. The ele dies when I'm about half way there.

Her complaint? 'Stupid NPCs.' That's right. She blamed Wolfson for not killing the Charr pack, oblivious to the fact that he can't, and that's the whole reason as to why he's stuck there.

But I can't help but think, who was the dumbest: Her for tripping a warband, or me for not getting my hide out of there when I had the chance?

Edit: Corrected starting date

Hi,

I'm slightly ill at the moment: Too ill to do something useful, but not ill enough not to be bored. So I decided to take some statistics about the Epics tournament. I don't think we'll make it to Epic 100 with Civ 3, so Epic 50 looks like a good enough jubilee to make a small retrospect.

The first Epic was opened on May 20, 2002, over three years ago! From all of the 50 Epics, 37 were scored, and 13 unscored. Sirian has been the main driving force of the tournament, sponsoring 37 Epics. T-hawk sponsored 5, Arathorn 2, and Rowain deWolf, Charis, Griselda, bihary, microbe and Kodi one each.

How many players have played the Epics is not known, but 104 different players reported about their games, were they be victory, loss, or unfinished. All in all, 483 games were reported. Here's a list of the most active players, not listing those with less than 5 reports:

43: Kylearan
25: Sirian
23: T-hawk
18: Sulla, Jabah
15: Dwip
14: Jester, Urugharakh, Grimjack
12: Cyrene, Griselda
11: falsfire
10: Sirp, Rowain deWolf, Jaxom
9: Smegged
8: Iteean, JMB, DogBoy, Charis, Bam-Bam
7: Hotrod, KingBob
6: mucluc, Sir Bugsy
5: JJ, cheshire cat, snaproll, speaker, 6thGenTexan, Dark Savant, LKendter, Justus II

(Er...who's that crazy guy with apparently Too Much Time On His Hands who alone is responsible for about 9% of all reports? Maybe someone should tell him to Get A Life... )

The game with the most participants was Epic 18: Potluck Duet ( 24 ) followed by Epic 24: Speed Racer ( 20 ), Epic 31: Potluck Brunch ( 19 ) and Epic 14: Alexander the Great/Always War ( 18 ). The Epics with the lowest number of players were Epic 23: Prince of Persia ( 3 ), Epic 49: Domination Dilemma ( 3 ), Epic 41: Balance of Power ( 4 ) and Epic 26: Mystery Meatlof ( 4 ). Average participation per Epic was 9,66 players. Average fun factor was somewhere between High and Very High.


Let's see where this will go from Epic 50 on onward, and how any tournament Civ 4 might spawn will fare. For me, it has been a lot of fun!

-Kylearan