Sounds like a good time to reinstate VNite :wub:

VNite is to encourage people who don't usually play much, or just don't play much on bnet, to make one day out of a week to catch up with friends to shoot the breeze and maybe catch a few games.
VNite is to encourage people to bring in their variants to coop with other similar characters.
Everyone is welcome (even with non Variant character) to join games and chat, and to play as long as proper courtesy is given to the game setting (Observe what variant(s) are in game).

Reminder: Channel RBD is the place to meet when bnet hiccups and trashes games.

Hope to see you all




Semi/Cripples who can appreciate some good travel campanions:

AlleyBaba - Fallen from grace to a street thug singing for nickles and dimes with only one loyal thief by his side. He still have 2 name sake Ali Babas hoping to find his fortune again. He can only afford tshirts and baseball caps (a first for KoP, I despise caps) and saving up for a cap with Harley logo. He is in early 60s entering Hell.

Alice Co-oper - Lvl 40ish naked Traffic Controller. Skills are: Attract, DV (Hardly ever used), Confuse, Decrep, Prison (for traffic violations) and CE to clear road blocks.

BruiseKnee - naked kick asn at clvl 21. can kick ass in act 1 :wacko:

GoGoGadgets - Lvl 27 looking for Baal. No Skill baba

ACoolMeleeExp (ACME) - Melee version of GGG. Lvl 18 somewhere in act 2-3

GoodBadNUgly - Lvl 60 tri-were druid in hell 2. Rabies in wolf form to infect monsters, changes to human form and then to bear form and give monsters a shock therapy. Slow paced due to time for rabies to work and relatively low poison dmg in Hell. He can be one hack of a tank in bear form, not from items or vit pump but Shockwave is quite effective. Can be highly dangerous character to play - can die easy between transformations

Also: I will be pre-building a bunch of BN(x) characters for BN games. Everyone is encouraged to pre-build, which means starting a new character and lvl it to clvl 9 at which time it can be hostiled. Questing to Cain and OC is usual.


KoP

There's a Diablo clone out there called Sacred. Anybody here tried it? The reviews at Amazon were a mixed bag, and checking out This Fansite seems to indicate that Sacred has borrowed an enormous amount straight out of Diablo II. If imitation is the highest form of flattery, they are flattering the heck out of Blizz North.

The sheer number of copycat items leads me to wonder. Can it really be that much like Diablo II? Or have they borrowed less than it appears? Reminds me of FPS clone games, where they offer only pale imitations of the original instead of something creative that actually fixes the original's weaknesses and builds on its strengths. If the price were twenty bucks, I'd still give it a shot, just out of curiosity, but at forty... Unless someone I trust says it's golden, I'll be biding my time and enjoying the Rogue Revival variant.


- Sirian

I'll spare you the de-nile jokes and just let you know that Epic Forty-four: Denial of the Nile, is now open. Enjoy!

-Griselda

My monitor has been acting strangely lately. When I look at the edge of the screen, I can see a waviness that slowly travels up the edge of the screen. Sometimes, it has little "blips" where it makes a strange sound like it's about to shut itself off. That happens fast enough that I couldn't tell you whether the picture is affected at all.

I'd like to get this monitor to last as long as possible (although it's a couple of years older than my computer, which is hardly new itself). But, I'm not sure if there are good ways to do that. For now, I've set the screen refresh rate to the lowest possible setting that this monitor supports. Will that do anything useful? Are there other tricks that I can use?

-Griselda

Four Rogues was one of my favorite ways to play Diablo. I even managed to talk Cy, Jaffa, and Jester into a run of them back in 2002, where we (barely) 3-dotted a quartet.

I tried playing a "D2 Rogue" back in v1.05 in early 01. Sorceress using a bow, enchant, teleport, shiver armor. The chief problem at the time was lack of Attack Rating along with the way the mlvl curve derailed early on in Nightmare. In D1, a strong rogue almost never misses, and without that effect in play, the D2 version just didn't quite hold up.


Along comes the 1.1 patch... Some things have changed. There were no Eth runes in vanilla D2. There were no elemental damage charms or circlets, fewer cube recipes. Enchant now boosts attack rating, nearly to 3x, which while still not truly Rogue-ish, does seem to make a "D2 Rogue" playable.

In D1, the Rogue had enough mana to use some spells, and enough magic to mature a number of spells to a decent level, especially with the aid of "reading glasses" or Enchanted shrines. She was a poor man's warrior or mage, though. As warrior, her incredible dex could make for almost flawless blocking, but her damage rate was not strong, while as warrior her spellcasting animation was slower, and she had less mana. The bow was her main strength, if played to the max.

There were Red Rogues and Blue Rogues. Reds would run without mana shield, and rely very heavily on teleport. They had less total life, but ironically, could use magic more liberally because they had more precise control over how much mana they had left. Blue Rogues ran with mana shield. They had more combined life, but if the shield went down, they'd have to recast it, and a really bad hit that takes down the shield also means no mana left for teleporting out of there... a mean combination in a pinch. Each type of rogue build had its strong points, and both were fun to play.


After getting to know the 1.1 patch in recent times, I think I can reliably build a fun variant that can capture some of the spirit of the D1 Rogue. So here we go.


CONCEPT

The Sorceress class embodies most of the magic skills from the original Diablo. Key among these is teleport. The D2 Amazon is rooted to the spot and relies on her pet to tank for her. This combined with all the bow related skills means she doesn't play like the D1 Rogue at all. Tactically, some things carry over, but strategically and in terms of gameplay... no. It's not a match. The D1 Rogue had sorcerous powers at a lower level than a true sorcerer, had teleport mobility, and had only normal attack type. Thus the sorcie is the closest match. She can teleport, support herself with "limited" magic, and must use normal attack.


DEXTERITY

Approximately half of your attribute points should be assigned to Dexterity. You should be able to block at the rate shown on a shield, or better. (Some leeway is allowed, temporarily. If you need more strength, for example, to use a key piece of equipment, you can slack off on dex for a level or two, but you need to catch it back up afterward.)


BOWS

Your bow is your primary weapon. Crossbows are allowed, but keep in mind that Enchant damage will be independent of bow damage or dexterity, and will be more effective with higher attack rates.


MELEE WEAPONS

Rogues may keep two bows in their weapon slots, or may carry any weapon type they please in the second slot. This includes throwing potions, throwing weapons, and melee weapons, as well as a second bow. Shields are also allowed. A rogue can swap and "go melee" any time she pleases. With all that dexterity, blocking may even be useful. In a team situation, some rogues tanking with shields while others shoot from behind is perfectly acceptable, but no rogue should forsake her bow entirely, so "melee-only" rogues are not acceptable. Since all Rogues will know how to teleport, none should ever "need" a tank to protect her.


ENCHANT

All D2 Rogues are to max Enchant as soon as possible. This because the AR boost is needed, and the fire damage doesn't hurt either.


TELEPORT

All D2 Rogues must obtain the Teleport skill. How much to use it is player's discretion.


PETS

No pets. Sorry. No mercs!


PRIMARY MAGIC SKILL

Each Rogue may obtain a primary magic skill. This will be her special spell, used to supplement her fighting prowess, take down physical immunes, and give her a means of corpse recovery "in extremis" other than quitting and rejoining the game. ONLY ONE primary skill per character is allowed. Primary skills are unlimited in skill level.

A Rogue may pick one primary skill from the following list of options:
* Firebolt
* Icebolt
* Charged Bolt
* Inferno
* Frost Nova
* Ice Blast
* Fireball
* Lightning


SECONDARY MAGIC SKILL

A Rogue may also select one Secondary skill, under the following restrictions:
1) Each secondary skill endures a maximum skill level restriction.
2) Secondary skills MAY NOT exceed 50% of the current skill level of the character's primary skill.

The following skills are available as secondary skills, with the applicable level caps:

* Nova, up to slvl 10.
* Firewall, up to slvl 8.
* Chain Lightning, up to slvl 10.
* Glacial Spike, up to slvl 10.
* Meteor, up to slvl 5.
* Thunderstorm, up to slvl 5.
* Blizzard, up to slvl 5.
* Hydra, up to slvl 8.
* Frozen Orb, up to slvl 5.

NOTE: during the final Hell run for fourth dot, some skills (like Thunderstorm) may be unusable in the "friendly fire" environment!


MASTERIES

Cold or Lightning Mastery may not exceed slvl 10. No restriction on Fire Mastery.


+SKILL ITEMS

Not allowed. Repeat: NOT ALLOWED. (Exception: initial staff as a weapon ONLY, until it is replaced.)


STATIC FIELD and BLAZE

Not allowed except as prereq. Do not use these skills!


ITEMS WITH CHARGES

Knock yourself out. However, if you need a recharge, you have to pay your own way.



RED ROGUES

* MAY NOT add to Energy!
* Must run with more life than mana. (Not counting Act One grace period in normal difficulty.)
* Must max out a cold armor of their choice before entering Hell Difficulty.
* May not learn nor use Energy Shield.


BLUE ROGUES

* MAY NOT add to Vitality!
* Must run with more mana than life (Exception: grace period until reaching clvl 24).
* Cold armor is allowed but optional. How much and when is player's discretion.
* Must learn Energy Shield.
* Must use Energy Shield at ALL times (after reaching clvl 24, of course).
* Must get Telekinesis to slvl 7 before entering Nightmare difficulty, and slvl 14 before entering Hell.
* Must get Energy Shield to slvl 3 before Nightmare and slvl 7 before Hell.

NOTE: Blue Rogue rules edited to reflect need for Telekinesis synergy to make Energy Shield effective!


ROGUE REVIVAL TEAM VARIANT

* Weapons, not magic, are a sister's primary tools. Any Rogue who kills more foes with her magic than with her weaponry is a disgrace to the sisterhood. Do not disgrace yourself in the eyes of your sisters!
* Rogues are a tight sisterhood. They may not play with any characters except sister Rogues. (This means they play only with fellow team members, in private team games. No "passersby" or "guests", no joining RBD games or AB games, etc.)
* Only Rogues are allowed in the sisterhood! No Amazons, no Paladins, no regular Sorcies, etc.
* If a Rogue "leaves" the sisterhood, she may play with other characters but never return to the team.
* No twinking. Use what you can find, buy, or make for yourself. This is a pure team concept.
* No "variant within the variant". You can run a rogue solo any way you like, but no macho stuff when playing as part of a team. Follow the rules and play within them to your full potential.
* Each Rogue should be viable solo, allowing players who miss a night (and any quests) to catch up on their own.
* Any number of players may play, up to the maxium 8 of course. Since Rogues are all the same -- except for Red or Blue, items, and magic skill choices -- team members may be added or subtracted at any time without disrupting the effectiveness of fellow team members.
* Any late-starting players who are trying to "catch up" and "join the team" must build their chars solo, in isolation. There are no exceptions to the purity concept. If you are to prove yourself to your sisters and join the order, you must show discipline and commitment!
* Although this team variant is highly flexible, it is not meant to be played in "pickup" fashion. Any true team variant requires regular gaming nights and scheduled activity.


4-DOTTING THE TEAM

Completing Normal earns the first dot, Nightmare the second, Hell the third. If the team 3-dots as a group and players want to continue, then restart Hell in unpartied fashion and go hostile with all fellow Rogues. Complete Hell in "Friendly Fire", played D1 style, to earn that "fourth dot". Since all chars will have completed the quests already, REMAIN HOSTILE AT ALL TIMES. None of that "party up for quests" stuff.

Be careful not to shoot your sisters in the back! And don't overdo those secondary magic skills, either. This isn't meant to be a "beyond naked" type of experience.


- Sirian

Hi there

One of the species in my cottage garden are lilies. They are hardy (drought-resistant even) and they smell wonderful. So here, courtesy of a friend with a digital camera, is a photograph of my favourite ones. They bloom the last of all the lilies and they smell the best. I love walking up the road towards my cottage and catching that scent as a I approach.



And, sucker that I am for wildflowers, here are some pictures of my very favourite one of all. They are in bloom right now and I spent the best part of an afternoon on the weekend riding my bicycle around to visit them.

I have completed my advanced readers copy signed by the man himself and filled with special artwork for club members.

Dark Tower VII is, well, with out revealing spoilers, is TERRIBLE!!

Worst letdown ever. We are talking Episode I Phantom Menace kind of bad. Near the end, with out giving it way, Mr. King himself recommends that the hardcore reader stop reading and never bother with the end of the book. And he was right. I should have took the warning and just put the damn thing down and forgot all about it. This one book pretty much destroys and cheapens everything else Stephen King has ever wrote. Awful, awful, AWFUL. Farking awful offal.

What is it, 12 more days till the actual commercial release? I can tell you right now, DO NOT bother getting this book. Just make up what ever ending you want in your own head, it'll be lots better. Reading this book will cause irreversable damage to your mind concerning every other SK novel.

What a prick.

What an insufferable self righteous stuck up flip your middle fingers at your fans little prick bastard.

I wasn't kidding about the warning. SK really does break from his flow to post a warning not to read further. Frankly, THAT SHOULD BE THE FIRST FARKING PAGE OF THE BOOK! YOU FARKING ARSEHOLE!! Ahem. Pardon me.

I am inconsolable. I am grief stricken, torn, and mourning the loss of one of my heros. And not Stephen King either.

Way to go. Completely destroy the whole series and every book that ties into it. Good job.

So much potential, only to stumble at the finish line. How sad.

Floody floody muddy muddy somebody please save all my animal buddies.

Seriously. FLOOD WATERS RISING!! Fraces is pissing all over the place. RAIN. Solid walls of sideways rain. Lake is turning into inland sea. I am concerned my home might actually become an island. Always thought it would be nice to have a moat... Water dangerously high. Inland sea actually has some pretty big waves whipped up by the wind. Power flickering. Sky switches from dull gray to witch green. Tornados spotted in area.

Blub blub blub bubble blub blub.

What the tech interest bonus translates to is that you get double the points for the first 15% of your current tech pool in that field, after that you get normal returns. Being able to double your investment in a given field is a powerful bonus indeed, especially for the early game (and certainly more manageable there).

This means that the optimal research pattern is to allocate 15% of the current progress and then increase it by 30% every turn. Why 30%? Because you invested 15% of the former sum, and those 15% were doubled.

However, you need a base before you can get the interest. What fraction of the total tech cost should you start out with? Of course, this depends on many factors. For techs that I want ASAP I use about 25%, this increases ~8 times in 8 years, giving me a 25% chance. For other techs I normally start out between 5% and 15%. Byt why not start out with a small base and gradually increase it (by increasing your investment by mor than 30% between turns)? I'm not sure I can prove that it's a bad idea, but I'll try:

Let's say you invest 300 BC in a fresh tech. The next turn you invest 400 BC, and the turn after that you invest 500 BC. On the first turn your pool increases by 300 RP, on the next turn it increases by 445 RP and on the third turn it increases by 611 RP. You have gotten 1356 points out of an investment of 1200 points.

Let's say you started out investing 800 BC instead. Next turn you invest 120 BC, then 156 BC. You get 1352 RP out of an investment of 1102 BC. This didn't delay your progress time-wise either. You had to make a larger initial downpayment, which delayed ship construction or colony development slightly, something you have to balance against the interest bonus.

Let's say you can make excess production grow by 8% (requires pretty good industrial and cleanup tech). Those 500 BC you didn't pour into research in the first example would yield a production increase of 40 BC. The next turn you spend more on research, so you lose 19 BCT (in comparison with the second example). The third turn you also spend more and lose another 26 BCT. So you end up with more production AND more tech by making a large initial downpayment rather than starting out small and increasing your investment gradually. I know this is just an example, but I think it holds water in general as well.

There are more factors to consider. When you need to slow down investment in a field that's maturing, you need new aspirants that have been built up, or you will have to slow down your progress. Or you can run into having spread over so many fields that you cannot use the full potential of the interest, meaning that you have spent too many BC on initial investments. You can never maximize this, but taking care not to waste too much of your money can give you an edge.

I have been browsing old threads on these two issues, and I have not found definite answers. Could you please verify or refute my theories?
1) What happens with your production when you send off colonists?
2) How is factory construction affected by Robotic Controls?

For the first one, I'm fairly certain that the game incorrectly assumes the production capability of all colonists to be 1 BC, so it immediately deducts 1 BC from all information displayed. If your colonists produce less than 1 BC then the production displayed is too low, if they produce more than 1 BC then it is too high. Actual production is accurate, though. This is why the eco information can change to both "Waste" and "+1 pop". You may have an adequate spending for a clean environment and still be informed that you're going to generate waste. If you care, you can probably get away with one click less on eco on turns where you send off colonists, provided that your planetology tech level is low.

Regarding robotic controls and factory costs, I have always had to pay the upgrade factories for all factories once discovered, even on new planets. When I reach 200 factories on a size 100 planet and I have RCIII the ind information changes to "Refit", but this doesn't seem to affect production in any way. I still produce the number of factories I could expect with the given allocation of ressources, none deducted for upgrading. I don't believe you have to upgrade existing factories either, though I'm not 100% sure on this.

EDIT: Forgot another one:

3) When you pour science points into a field that you have not yet started researching, the game deducts 10% of these, rounded up. This is usually a non-issue, but it helps explain why 1 RP never gets you started, as that 1 RP is eliminated every round without opening the field. It's also important not to pour a truckload of science into a new field, as that would amount to a small, but considerable, loss.