According to some info I received, those who pre ordered can, I presume with the completion of the full order, start playing 48 hours before everyone else.

So, who will be playing when?

Occhi aka Reprobate Rogue

Got myself the Europe pre-order of GW. I have been given my beta weekend key as well as a buddy key, so if anyone wants a buddy key for this final beta event, please leave a message here.

EDIT: key taken.

I am looking forward to this beta event, for I have missed March's and also I had a computer upgrade, I will be able to enjoy the graphics now!

Who will be there this weekend? Hope to be seeing you!

I’m one of those idiots who refreshed their computer in anticipation of D2.



For a graphics card, I chose a Voodoo5, as everyone said the game ran a ton better in Glide. Boy, howdy, were they right.



3dfx’s unfortunate (yet, sadly, deserved) demise left it an orphan child, but, man, did it run D2. 150 fps in town, and, though it could be brought to its knees by too many spell effects unless you ran a mod to eliminate the sprite screwups by Blizz, it was a workhorse in this game long after tech had passed it by. People bought shiny new Geforces that couldn’t touch it (in D2).



When I came back to D2, I had a 9800Pro, and figured raw horsepower would overcome dog-slow D3D performance, and, largely, this was true.



When I got an x800xl, I thought raw horsepower would now blow this old game out the window. Only in town. In combat, it was WORSE than the old 9800Pro.



I had had enough, and decided to try glide again. One glide dll later:








Now THAT is horsepower.



We’ll see how it holds up to spell effects tomorrow night—I might well be crawling back to report I had to bail from Rogues to reset to D3D 8-).



--Cy





ps—it is REALLY odd to see the game in the extra-contrasty glide mode without it being compensated for by the extra-vibrant 3dfx colors



pps-going to 1600 x 1200 with forced mipmaps and trilinear filtering and anisotropy was really odd—no more jaggies (this is driver pixel-cramming—you see no more real estate).

Despite a separate battle with lag on my part, the team got as far as killing the Ancients last night. How much farther did y'all get?

And, amongst the fleeting comments I managed to see, between disonnects, there was some discussion about how many characters in one game is viable, before we all inevitably start treading on one another's toes. Did you come to any conclusions?

I have not picked up either expansion pack for Civ III, but I recently got back into the game for a few "quick" games . So here's a list of things that I really liked about civ III over its predecessor.

1) Culture. Culture is one of the best aspects of Civ III. It adds a new depth and strategy to the game that changes the game in multiple ways. It adds many choices and new priorities in the game, particularly on higher difficulty levels.

2) Workers. The workers in civ III are much better balanced than settlers/engineers from civ II. The lack of food support requirements and their inability to transform land makes them a much better balanced unit than their predecessors from other games.

3 ) Luxuries. The luxuries/happiness model is one of the greatest advancements of Civ III. It adds a lot of strategic decision making and prioritising, which never existed in earlier games.

4) Strategic resources. See luxuries . (Possibly the only exception to this is the complete dependance on oil in the late industrial/early modern age).

5) Diplomacy. The diplo model in civ III is very solid and holds up even after rigorous testing. It rarely brakes down and is only really vulnerable to a couple of exploits. It also adds a lot to the game over the previous "screw the player" diplo model of Civ II.

6) The AI. No matter how broken it looks in Sirian's experiments, the AI of civ III is generally quite intelligent for what it is. A couple of small improvements could be made (such as accounting for corruption when assigning worker tiles), but overall it puts up quite a good fight. And it actually settles all its land.

7) The wonder system. OK so some of the wonders are a little strong, like the pyramids and sun tsus, but only on certain maps. At least the AI is smart enough to prioritise the good wonders, which makes it tough to get them, and you can't get them all, but wonders are still generally attainable. They also tend to be fairly well balanced for their sheild cost. Much better than civ IIs great library only expiring at flight and pyramids working everywhere wonders.

8 ) War weariness. The war weariness system is so much better than civ IIs unhappiness-based-on-unit-locations system. It keeps the representative governments in line without taking warfare off the table completely. Very well balanced IMO.

9) The tech tree/age system. I find that the civ III tech tree is the easiest and yet most complex tech system I've encountered. It is easy to understand, and well balanced, but it allows for different styles of play and gives the player tough decisions (the middle ages especially holds the most interesting choices - do you go for early cav or do you go for some of the wonder/infra techs). Techs are also well priced for their relative power.

10) The corruption system. In everything but the old communism (haven't tried the new communism) the corruption system works extremely well. Care can be taken to make distant towns somewhat productive, but your core will always be your strongest producers. Forbidden palace locations are one of the more complex trade-offs in the game. Do you hold out for a possible leader to rush a FP in the middle of a defeated enemies core, or do you build your FP 2-3 city lengths away earlier in the game. It's these choices that make Civ Civ, and not Age of Empires.

Overall, I really hope that Civ 4 is much the same as Civ 3, only with a stronger AI, updated graphics and more choices and tradeoffs.

-Smegged

"Oh? Hi there. Are you one of my students? You look vaguely familiar? What? You're not a student? Perhaps we met at the last conference, then. Whatever you need, I'm sure one of my assistants can help you. I really must get back to the lab now."

(Epic Forty-Eight is now open.)


- Sirian

We started this evening, sans CH who never made it. (CH, if you get the chance, you can catch up on your own. We are all ~clvl15 and at the OC WP, all prior quests completed.)

It's already apparent that together, we roll over most opposition with hardly a pause... while when one or two of us go off on our own, things get much more painful in short order. The pace was for the most part fairly go-go-go-ish, but hopefully that will slow down once we get into tougher areas of the game. Partly it's a result of having more players and partly it's a result of not having gelled into a team yet.

The only troublesome monsters were a cursed archer pack that took down half the team in short order, and a LEB archer pack that the team approached with a bit more caution and thus fared better. We're also still feeling our way into our various roles, so hopefully things like aura coordination will improve as time goes on.

I posted last year about how much fun was to be had making Easter Eggs. We did it again this year, at the cottage.

Here are a couple of photographs of the results. Major artistic talent? No. Fun making them anyway? You bet ! The second picture shows the eight-year-old's effort.

Time's up on this one already? You've got to be kidding me!

- Sirian

We at Apolyton kindly greet you.

Over time, we have built a school for Civilization. Apolyton University is a school of strategy, where students sharpen their Civ3 skills and share their experiences in a series of thematic games. When playing an Apolyton University game, gaining and sharing knowledge is more important than getting a high score, a fast finish, or even winning the game. Participants are encouraged to share their strategy after the game, and even to try several attempts.

As time has passed, we have seen a natural decline in single player activity, but also an ongoing core of stalwarts in regards to multi-player, especially in the PBEM format. Accordingly, we have chosen that our latest course, perhaps the last for Civ3, be such.

This course will be 'AU 602 - Team Play'. We think that this will be valuable, in that Civ4 will likely be more so oriented around MP. We would like to see the broadest possible participation in this course, including inter-site activity. All past rivalries, face-offs, grudges, etc., should be forgiven (we hope)... let's have some fun with it. FYI, we are inviting participants from 10+ sites other than Apolyton, as well as Firaxis (although they are probably a tad busy with Civ4).

The 'poly link is here:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.ph...did=131245

Come... to quote, "Let's PLAY!"