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Hi Seravy,

I have no idea what happened, but in my current impossible game, someone cast a spell overland on my doomstack. First, I'm not sure how they could see it - there are no units anywhere near it. I thought maybe earth lore? but the wizard i think cast it only has sorcery and life. I checked for invisible units, and there are none (its also on Myrror, and until that turn he never had any units on Myrror; and the one stack he now has (via Astral Gate) is on the opposite side of the plane. No globals (that wizard has Just Cause, Aura of Majesty, and Aether Binding). Second, the spell itself caused a graphic of 5 little cylinders of white with blue trim to move up and down on the stack (one on each corner, one in the middle). (I don't have detect magic yet, although the 3 remaining AI are using disjunction on anything they can anyway.)

Now the part that actually made me post: Each of the 8 Hammerhands in my stack have Eldritch Weapon, Focus Magic, Holy Armor, and Holy Weapon cast on them. After this spell was cast, 5 of them still had the same spells; 1 had only Focus Magic, and 1 has only Focus Magic, Holy Armor, and Holy Weapon (so I thought at first that it was some kind of dispel - but I thought AI couldn't use dispels overland?)

But the 8th now has the following spells cast on him, most of which I do not know: Eldritch Weapon and Immolation; True Sight, Lionheart, Bless, Planar Travel, Holy Weapon; Animated; Flight, Spell Lock, Resist Magic, Magic Immunity, Windwalking, Invisibility; and Iron Skin, Regenerate, Resist Elements, Elemental Armor, Water Walking.

So he lost Holy Armor and Focus Magic, but he got.. well.. a lot of other stuff. The invisibility is what caught my eye, and the wind walking is what really got me going whaaaaaat; and then I looked at the list of spells, and now I've paused my game because this is extremely strange.

I'm not 100% sure as to what wizard cast the spell, but my guess is Jafar, with 7 Sorcery Books, 5 Life Books, Warlord and Alchemy; he is an Aggressive Theurgist, and is the only AI actually at war with me (this was actually the first turn after he declared war on me.)

Yep, this will be interesting...or short.

I absolutely have no strategy or plans because...well, I barely even know how this game operates compared to Civ4, etc. So I'm just going to play it and see what happens.
If there are any who have been playing Civ5 who want to offer me any tips, thoughts, or even ded-lurk me, please don't hesitate. I may try to actually finish or play more of a SP game to get used to things, but even that is highly unlikely. So this will essentially be my first time playing the game, period. Other than the short stint I did of starting an SP game a few months ago.

It was back in early-mid 2012 when I first played a variant, that is truly a variant in the sense that it significantly changes the way my friend Attila and I viewed the game.

Two years prior, my guildmates, including Attila invited me to do a purist run. I didn't know then what a purist was, but I was getting burned out on the usual endgame life, full xunlai, etc. I was a pat rack, pack rat, and it was how it was. That run carried another restriction: Proph items, skills, etc. only. We dubbed it proph mode and it really felt like when I was discovering the game for the first time. I also made a proph mode ranger not much later, who almost-finished the game I think.

Then two years later, even prophmoding got a bit old: There was quite a lot of equipment laying around, and finishing Hell's Precipice meant we were pushed into GWBeyond content whether we liked it or not. GW2 was around the corner too, so when Attila invited me to do some low level questing, I brought out my low level warrior I planned for proph-moding but never bothered to level up to the game, and the variant was born along the way as we played. Here I'll recount the tale how it went.

Participants:
Grasping Ghoul, Ranger/Warrior --Attila
Olara Csilag, Warrior/Elementalist --Boro

Rules:
Purism: no use of account-wide skill unlocks, Only items found in the variant, no xunlai.
Prophecies-mode: Proph skills/Items/Runes/insignias.
GW2 style: No heroes (obviously), and no henchies. No dedicated healers: we bring our own healing, and live or die with that.

Burned ascalon was routine: A warrior around level 11 can solo it without issues, so a level 8 Warrior coupled with a lower level Ranger using axes meant a piece of cake. The way the pets were buffed up in previous updates to deal 33% more and take 33% less damage also helped. We got the important outposts, I got my skill quests done, and it was onto the hard part, Northern Shiverpeaks.

There I really paid the price for choosing elementalist as my secondary. Howlers transferred conditions to me, Sages cast Empathy (and could shatter armor of eart, so I didn't consider that either), Axe wielders and crushers had enough damage to wear me down, ice golems and scouts could slow me down. Ettins had weakness, and neither Warrior nor Elementalist skills had an answer to ALL of that. I only had healing signet for healing too!
Grasping Ghoul on the other hand, was in his element: With blocking stances, elemental resistances troll unguent and healsig, a pet, and the low energy costs of adrenaline skills (0) he was all but unbreakable.

So we switched tactics. Whereas in ascalon I could happily frenzy away and eat charr for breakfast, here I needed to stay in the back and let my elementalist side out. I slotted in Glyph of Lesser Energy, Phoenix and Fireball (And phoenix still had this double-damage deal with one hit at your adjacent enemies and one hit at the target, so I was dealing some SWEEt damage), pumped my fire magic and focused on dealing that first burst of damage that gets them down. This got us through Borlis Pass and Frost Gate. Same deal with the ettins in Griffon's Mouth and Gates of Kryta since the undead were weak to fire. Let ghoul get their attention, and let me assassinate the targets, and we were fine.

We made one arrangement after our cap signets: To capture Defy Pain, since I was really little more than a crippled 2pip elementalist at this point.

Getting the boss was time enough, as he doesn't always spawn near the Beacon's Perch outpost gate, and clearing the way took all of Attila's skills and my support, but it was done. He took care of the ice imps, then we finally collapsed on the boss.

I also got an upgrade from fireball, to Inferno, in north kryta province. It cast faster and dealt more damage of course, and it was perfectly in line with my Glyph->two ele spells->cyclone axe->chop away fiery warrior assassin MO. Grasping ghoul also gave me a fiery axe, to go with the conjure flame skill I bought in Lion's Arch.

Afterwards we had to decide where to go next, and decided against doing the missions and the long trip around the Maguuma Jungle. The local fauna is problem enough and we don't have the self-heals to survive that. Instead we decided to take the "easy" way to Sanctum Cay and try to cross to the crystal desert from there. Bergen hot springs was a convenient next stop, offering an easily done skill quest, and then we went onwards to the Temple of the Ages.

A bit more skill questing, running from enemies, and lot of feeling like a warror-mage later, we stood at the Sanctum Cay outpost. True, we skipped a lot of missions and skill quests, but hey, we were going to cross to the crystal desert without ever having used as much as a henchie!

For most of the mission i carried the scepter of orr and used it's energy regen to good effect. Through Attila's tanking and my magic power, the undead were being pushed further and further back. Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and for the second part of the mission, I had to go without that sweet +1pip. Now I don't remember if we did the bonus or not, but I know that I died at the last stand where we were protecting the vizier, defying pain till my last breath. Attila remained standing however, and we won passage to the crystal desert.

There we tried a bit more fighting, but the scarabs and d-shot trapper devourers weren't impressed by our low-support duo, so once again it was guerilla warfare and lots of running that saw us reach Augury Rock.

It was at that point that we concluded this variant, finding our limit with just these two characters and these two secondary professions, but decided to continue our characters in a relaxed fit, and not much later schooled Glint with only three henches (Alesia, Orion, Dunham) present, a ranger without an elite, and a warrior without his best armor.

As I don't have a lot of experience with CoM yet, I'm wondering where the difficulty levels actually are right now.

For instance, my ideal is that on normal, a new player could probably win - even with sub optimal play, like not expanding fast enough, and 'poor' race/retort/book selections. (There are enough balancing changes done that I don't think there are actually poor selections. More like non synergistic selections that could be easily at odds with one another - like conjuring plus life.)

Hard could be beaten by the 'poor' selections, but not always, and would require a very experienced player to do so. On the other end, with very strong selections, hard could be beaten 100% of the time. But its aimed for good, not very good, selections.

Extreme should not be beatable by the 'poor' selections without incredible luck. But should it be beatable by very strong selections 100% of the time? This difficulty I feel should be aimed at the very strong selections.

Impossible should require very strong selections, and even then, not be winnable all the time.



That's my thoughts. Is that where Seravy is aiming at? Do other people find the difficulties match their expectations?

Has anyone here played this before? I'm guessing not, so I'll take a few minutes to gush about it with the hopes that maybe a few people will try it.

If, even as recently as a few weeks ago, someone had told me that I'd be actually willing to pay real cash money for an Interactive Fiction (IF) game in the year 2016, I'd have thought they were crazy. If someone had told me that it had some of the most fun and interesting gameplay of any new game that I've played in years, I'd think they were even crazier still. And yet... they are completely right!!

The game is called Hadean Lands and it is an absolute treasure.

The game begins with you, the lowly Ensign J. Forsyth, an apprentice aboard His Majesty's starship The Unanswerable Retort, waking up in a daze in the aftermath of some sort of bizarre calamity. Keep in mind that this isn't your average starship. Hadean Lands is set in a future based on an intriguing speculation: what if the alchemists of medieval Europe were the true founders of modern science? That is to say, the The Unanswerable Retort runs on alchemy!

Thus, the gameplay revolves around figuring out, using all five of your senses, a bunch of weird alchemical rituals and applying them (using the ship's labratories and various ingredients you come across) to solve puzzles to aid you in repairing the starship and rescuing your crewmates. The rituals involving setting up a proper environment, uttering/intoning/singing various sealing/binding words, combining various ingredients, invoking mathematical concepts, etc. There's recipes (which you sometimes need to modify), but you can also experiment freely and everything you do gives clear feedback as to whether what you're doing is working or not.

Better yet is that a clever world-reset mechanic, sophisticated auto-travel and find commands, and the ability to repeat any complex ritual that you've already successfully completed work together to completely eliminate the tedious "fetch quest" aspect that plagues most other types of adventure games, allowing you to use your full concentration solving the puzzles. (which, by the way, are all extremely fair.) And, although is a pure text adventure, it does come with a pair of gui elements: an auto-updating map and a little codex that keeps track of various formulas, rituals, and facts for you so you don't have to use the "recall" command quite so often.

Anyways, I can't recommend this game highly enough. I absolutely loved it and I say that as someone who otherwise doesn't like IF much at all. You can buy the game on steam or at humblebundle. It costs only 12 dollars and worth every single penny.

This will be an OP for this thread

[video=youtube]www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1--jNVBMuY[/video]

He doesn't like strategy games so he doesn't really give it a fair shake. Oh well. [/Embed]

In which I try to make a balanced natural looking map with some goodies for the players to find.

The set up of the map is 2 relatively tight continents (each with 3 players) and 6 larger islands. The 6 islands can be reached easily pre astronomy with broad lanes of coast to avoid the worst clutter of manouvering settlers and ships through chokepoints. 3 of them have unique luxuries and a natural wonder, three have rare luxuries and a city state. I hope that this will make naval matters important from early on. Later on in the game there are two polar continents that will have 4 more city states, some unique and rare luxuries and strategics as well. I wonder if I should place all oil/aluminum/uranium off the two main continents or if that skews it too much towards naval. Hopefully the map makes both the peaceful option of building a naval empire and the military option of conquering your continent equally viable. The current state of the map:



The idea behind the starts is to provide a number of start options. By the river and coastal, in the hills coastal, inland by the forest for chops or further inland with more jungle.

Players:


Blue:
3. Sunrise
6. Der_Zorn_Gottes
2. El Grillo
4. WarriorKnight
8. DaveV

Red:
5. David Corperial
7. pjabrony
1. Bobchillingworth
9. Azoth
10. Lewwyn


Round 1 Spymasters:

* El Grillo
* Bob