I'm really looking forward to playing some early game Civ again.

I want to fix the problem that finding heroes fails when you clear an encounter with an army of 9.
Removing the restriction was easy but it does not split the stack of units afterwards, unlike when your town makes a unit and it has no room.
I found the subroutine responsible for splitting up your units, it's called both when you hire mercenaries or produce a unit.
So far so good, all we need now is to call it from where you find your hero (or reanimate your 10th undead or zombie, I also want to make that happen), but this is were I'm stuck.

So we have

BE546 : 9A 98 00 C0 03 call j_CheckOver9UnitsRegroup

and I want to call that from another location, 9C385 (this one is for rising undead, heroes will be another address but same concept).

So I do 9C385 : 9A 98 00 C0 03.
However, I read that far calls are being relocated when the exe loads, so I also need to add an entry to the relocation tables.
I increased the number of entries at 00006 : 79 08 to 7A 08.
Then I tried to calculate the data that goes into the entry.
9C385 is ovr123:06A5 in the disassembler.
That means the offset is 6A8, I add 3 because the 4th byte of the instruction is the segment which needs to be relocated, not the first.
For the segment address, I need to subtract the start of the code in the exe, which is 2A00, as well as the offset, 9C385-2A00-6A5=992E0, meaning the segment is 992E.

So I then move to the last byte of the relocation table and add to the empty space the address 992E:06A8, meaning I do 2222: a8 06 2E 99 in the hex editor.
And after all that, when I load it in the disassembler I get a warning that the file is invalid, so the relocation data is bad. I also tried all numbers around that just in case the segment isn't the 4th-5th byte in the call statement (I'm quite sure it is) but nothing between A5-AA works.
Why? What am I doing wrong in that calculation? Or is it some other problem?
When I tried 0000:0000 as the relocation address in other words left the table entry empty it correctly changed the beginning of the code in the exe (starting from the 1st byte not from the 0th surprisingly), but if I enter my calculated address it doesn't even load in the disassembler.

This will be the lurker thread for WW #41 New Horizons. I would prefer to keep spoilers to a minimum. If you must drop spoilers, please use the appropriate

In my most recent game on impossible difficulty, I got to experience the joy of unhittable Alkari ships. I actually like playing as the Alkari, even though many consider them to be a lower-tier race, because their bonuses actually factor in to your strategy. You play differently with them; it's not just a case of getting more of whatever you would normally be using faster like it often is with the races that have economy boosts. (I would also include the Silicoids, the Bulrathi, the Darloks, the Humans, and to a lesser extent the Mrrshans as races that actually offer different strategic opportunities, and not just economy bonuses that will help you do more of whatever you were going to do anyways).

I agree with the conventional wisdom that Alkari > Mrrshans. If you do the math, going from 50% evade to 80% evade or 95% evade (as one often can with the Alkari) ups your survivability and thus lethality by anywhere from 2.5 to 10 times, whereas going from 50% offensive hit chance to 90% offensive hit chance only ups your lethality by less than 2 times. Players of FTL should intuitively see how this works. Given 4 shield bubbles in FTL, going from 50% evade to 66% evade means that you go from being able to withstand 8 laser shots on average to being able to withstand 12 shots. Whereas going from 33% evade to 50% evade only means going from being able to take 6 laser shots to being able to withstand 8, an increase of only 2.

In my last run as the Alkari in MoO, I was able to leverage the evade bonus on two occasions.



In the early game, the sparrowhawk laser fighter design was able to chase away small armed escorts and armed colony ships, crucially slowing down the AI. In one fight, 6 sparrowhawks killed an armed Bulrathi colony ship while only losing 1 sparrowhawk. Sure, it took a while to plink away at the colony ship's 100 hp, but it only had a 1/20 chance of hitting my sparrowhawks, so it was only a matter of time. With other races, I would have needed to bring 15-20 laser fighters to have a decent shot at killing the armed colony ship, and I would have taken losses in the process.

Later in the game, after getting megabolt cannons and impulse drives, I went on the offensive and designed two seriously effective ships. The Paladin was just fantastic as a planet defender, stack neutralizer, and escort. I really only needed one of these things at a threatened planet to nullify whole stacks of tiny enemy death spore bombers. Warp dissipator + repulsor beam ftw!

And the Wareagle design was a nearly invincible bomber that leveraged the alkari evade bonus, along with impulse engines, the inertial stabilizer, and ECM V, to give it a ridiculous 15 evade against missiles (12 is the displayed value, +3 for the alkari bonus). Thanks to a battle movement speed of 4, I could close on missile bases by the second turn, and meanwhile a planet with 40 missile bases could kill, oh, maybe 1 Wareagle in those two turns, before I obliterated their bases (usually in about 1-2 turns if I had 15-20 wareagles in the stack).

With the Paladin and Wareagle having warp speed of 5, I was zooming from enemy planet to enemy planet, bombing out their defenses and trashing their fleets faster than I could send ground invasions. It was awesome.

The locust design that you see there at the bottom was my plan for killing the Guardian. Sadly, the game was decided by that point, and in the very next year I voted myself in as Galactic Emperor rather than deal with 25 more turns of micromanagement.

WW # 41 - New Horizons

Life Support Status
1. Goreripper was killed on night one. He was a Human Expansionist League member.
2. BRickAstley has been lynched on day one. He was a Human Expansionist League member.
3. Bacchus
4. Serdoa
5. Rowain
6. Lewwyn
7. AdrienIer
8. Gazglum
9. Novice
10. Zakalwe was lynched on day two. He was an Earth First Liberationist.
11. Azarius ----- Killed Night 0 by saboteurs in an opening move to take over the ship.

There have been inventions throughout the history of mankind that changed forever the direction of its evolution. The wheel, the written word, the smelting of bronze and iron, the splitting of the atom. The perfection of fusing atoms came nearly too late in the human story. By the time it was perfected, providing cheap and clean power, it was nearly too late for the race that dominated their world. The skies were clogged with pollution, the seas high, nearly apocalyptical weather a regularity. Fusion power prevented things from getting much worse, but was deemed insufficient for turning back the clock.

So instead the nations of the world gathered together to create great ships that would travel to distant worlds, forming the Human Expansionist League. Through the use of cryogenic suspension the best and brightest of the world were bundled together to take humanities legacy to the stars, to keep the history of Homo-Sapiens Sapiens moving forward. To some however, the abandonment of Earth was the wrong decision. These groups decried not only the loss of humanities intellectual future, but also the sheer cost of the projects that took them away on one way trips. The most aggressive of these is known as the Earth First Liberationists.

It was Captain Azarius of the New Horizons that first discovered that something wasn’t completely right aboard the majestic kilometers long ship. Odd items showed in various places throughout the ship’s cargo manifests. Odd lines of code appeared throughout the ships central computer. In depth analysis of the 10,000 plus bodies on board showed outliers in unexpected numbers. Something was clearly amiss.

Not knowing who he could trust however, the Captain prepared alone, keeping his suspicions from the ten other members of the crew that were keeping the ship running as it ramped up speed and surged towards an orbital maneuver with Jupiter. Half hoping he was just being paranoid, he isolated various sub-systems of the computer and retasked them to perform similar, yet somewhat different tasks than they were normally supposed to do. His goal was the investigation of every member of his active crew, in order to either put to rest his suspicions, or have someone to lay them on.

It isn’t clear if he somehow tipped his hand, or if the plan intended for him to be killed, but less than a month into the 50+ years journey, the crew was startled out of their ennui by the jettisoning of the captains habitation pod, something that wasn’t due to occur until their arrival at a distant star. Knowing he didn’t have much time available, and presuming the conspiracy was limited to a few, Azarius broadcasted not only his suspicions, but also a listing of the programs he had prepared for his investigations. Not long after that, the constantly accelerating New Horizons moved beyond the range of the limited transmission capacities of the pod, and the Captain was consigned to the deep dark of space to die alone.

Following the captains announcements, the crew scrambled to secure the programs he had prepared. During the scramble however, many of the programs were damaged, as multiple people tried to access the same functions. The result was only a few copies of most of the programs being made, and none of them stable beyond a single use. To further complicate matters, the systems the programs were stored in by the crew were themselves unstable, never intended for the purposes they were being used for. Each pair of sub-routines was located on individual servers, and any time a crew member used one of them, the other stored in the same system would also be lost.

Despite having access to a number of programs, each crew member was functionally left with only half the number they had managed to secure. In order to find the traitors on board, the crew would have to work together. The greatest tool they had available was the ability to override the security measures for the various pods each crew member worked out of, once per day, and jettison that pod as the captains had been jettisoned. Once initiated, the pod that received the most commands to be jettisoned would follow the captain into the empty depths of space.

Thus, the crew is left to conduct the investigation the captain had intended on conducing himself. Those tasked with protecting the lives of tens of thousands would be reduced to taking the life of one at a time until no members of the Earth First Liberationists were left on the ship. Should they fail in their task however, the traitors would be able to use the ship to make a statement so horrific that the governments of Earth would be unable to ignore it, and would be forced instead to focus on their dying planet. The fate of humanity's future lies in your hands.

Crew Members
1. Goreripper
2. BRickAstley
3. Bacchus
4. Serdoa
5. Rowain
6. Lewwyn
7. AdrienIer
8. Gazglum
9. Novice
10. Zakalwe

The following is a list of all sub-routines Captain Azarius had managed to create before his death.

Tracer

1. Days are 48 hours long. Nights are 24 hours long.
   
2. Days and nights end at 10:00 PDT/18:00 UTC. The forum clock is used as the official clock. Votes and actions posted at xx:59 count, votes and actions posted at xx:00 do not.
   
3. Posting is not allowed after the day and night deadlines until the GM has posted a phase resolution.
   
4. In the event of extended forum downtime or downtime that occurs in close proximity of the deadline or some other event that disrupts the game, the day may be extended 24 hours at the GM's discretion.
   
5. During the day each player may cast one vote for someone to be lynched.
   
6. Votes must be posted in red text or they will not count. Votes with spelling errors of names do count so long as it's unambiguous in the GM's opinion whom is being voted for. Votes embedded in quotes do not count.
   
7. The player with most lynch votes at the end of the day is lynched and eliminated from the game. Tiebreaks: The first person to reach their vote total will be lynched in the event of a tie.
   
8. Anyone failing to vote for 2 consecutive game days or 3 days total will be mod killed and removed from the game with a loss.
   
9. Dead players may make one posthumous post that doesn't contribute to discussion.
   
10. Forum profile camping is not allowed.
    
11. To prevent confusion that may arise in the case of cross posting, posts may not be edited for any reason.
    
12. Players may not communicate with other players about the game outside the thread via PM, email, chat, quicktopics etc. unless told otherwise.
    
13. Players must check their PMs and make sure they're alive each game day before posting.
    
14. If all players are simultaneously eliminated, or the game reaches a stalemate situation, the game is a draw.
    
15. Directly quoting role PMs or other communication from the GM isn't allowed unless otherwise specified.
    
16. Breaking rules will result in penalties ranging from warnings to loss of abilities to being mod killed, depending on the severity of the infraction and the GM's discretion.

Anyone feeling up for some islands game?

By hexing wizards.exe with the following :
B1374 : 75 74 → 90 90
B13C5 : 8B C6 BA C8 04 F7 EA 8B 56 FE 8B D8 → C7 87 18 9F 00 00 90 8B 56 FE 90 90
B13D8 : 05 → 11
CAC9C : 5C → 73
CACAC : 4C → 63
CACF0 : 75 07 56 9A 25 00 E0 04 59 8B C6 BA C8 04 F7 EA 8B D8 83 BF 1C 9F 00 75 →
90 90 56 9A 25 00 E0 04 59 83 BF 1C 9F 00 90 90 83 BF 18 9F 00 EB 83 EB

This makes the AI automatically loop the casting process until the current spell cannot be finished this turn due to low mana or low remaining skill. Meaning that 200 skill = 5x Hell Hounds a turn, not only one.

Please test and report if it's working (or not), it does work for me.

See : https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...p?tid=9846

Any interest in discussing this here, or are we officially a dead forum?

I'm very interested to see how Fnatic will do... I think the gap between Korea and the rest is closer this year than it's been for a while, possibly since season 2.

The Lizardmen challenge roleplaying scenario: You are the Lizard King!

You are Taihin, the new king of lizardmen. Your father Daihin, like most lizardmen, cared for nothing but gold and as many eggs as his females could spawn. On a recent trade mission to the Nomads, the desert dwellers were insulted by his meager mud-based trade goods when they dried out and fell apart under the baking sun. Daihin died of dehydration in the desert after his escort of Horsebows deserted him to pursue more lucrative trade opportunities with the other land-bound races.

You are different, and special. After using your inborn magic abilities to kill off all of your litter mates, you are the only one that remains. You are curious about the outside world, and wish to make it your own. You have heard of the Spell of Mastery, and do not wish anyone to cast it. To make sure this happens, you will need to crush the whole world underneath your claws. Water is your element, and dryness your enemy. You will expand far beyond your single settlement of crude mud huts and shake the world. Only races that can handle the great oceans are worthy to add to your empire, all others must fall. The world is too small for all the Dusties, the wet races must conquer all!

Game setup:

Land Size: Small
Magic: 1.0x
Wizard Picture: S'ssra

Books and Abilities:
Life: 1
Nature: 4
Channeler
Charismatic
Conjurer
Mana Focusing
Sagemaster

Select Spells:
Common Nature: 3 (War Bears [because you're a conjurer], Water Walking [so your conjured creatures can swim like your lizards], Earth Lore [to see where to swim])

Race: Lizardmen
Banner Color: Green

Send swimming lizard settlers and soldiers overseas to colonize new land before the computers get there. Conquer a good naval race, build warships and rule the waves! Races not capable of building warships must be razed, they are not worthy to join your glorious amphibious empire. If you control the sea then nobody can invade you, because they've got to cross the ocean to get to your land. It's a nice strategy, and one not often taken by regular players.

Lizard population grows quickly, but their primitive society can't build many structures so they need to grow. They have just enough brain to know that they need to conquer races who have brains (but they do not see the use of taking slaves who do not share their love of water). Lizardmen like to find new places to expand, and are very curious about the outside world beyond their mud huts. Do not leave any stone unturned, every unknown square on both worlds must be uncovered either with magic spirits or ships or Earth Lore, using F2 to frequently check the world map for stray black squares. Deserts are your kryptonite, no lizard unit may enter, only non-lizards. Prioritize the acquisition of Change Terrain to get rid of them all. You may never cast this spell on swamps! Get rid of the arid! Down with the dehydrated! The Dusties must be drenched!

You must prioritize construction of the Maritime Guild over other structures. This means if you can build any structure on the road to the Maritime Guild, then you must build it before any others. However, it's not a hard-and-fast rule. Like, if you need to build troops for defense or an Animist's Guild because you're short on food or whatever, then go ahead and do that. It's not like you have to build nothing but Warships once you have the capability, it's just so the playthrough feels different. But the Maritime Guild comes before, say, a Parthenon because you want Priests. You don't have to raze non-coastal cities that can't build Shipwrights' Guilds, that's going too far. But...maybe...

At the beginning of the game, you do not know of the existence of Myrror, nor of Draconians. If you are lucky enough to discover Draconians in your game, you are awestruck by their superior culture and learning. You can keep their cities without razing because your long-lost cousins have much to teach you, and you are greatly impressed with their amazing Air Ships (you must prioritize the Ship Yard to produce them).

Your Javelineer units are good in both melee and ranged combat. They may not throw their javelins at anything but point-blank range. They must advance to within 1 or 2 squares of the enemy (adjacent or 1 empty square between) before being able to use their missile attack.

Heroes and mercenaries and summoned units of any race may be kept provided they get Water Walking cast on them to fit in. Ordinary non-Lizardman troops don't need Water Walking unless they are in a hero stack. You particularly despise Nomads due to their desert nature and must prioritize their destruction to avoid them drying out the world. Nomad cities count as deserts no matter what the underlying terrain.

Remember that even though lizards can swim, they can still board ships for faster movement. This includes galleys and triremes. They are legal to produce even though you much prefer warships.

Rule Summary. There are a lot of these so you might want to print this out before starting play.

1. This challenge is for the v1.4n Insecticide patch ONLY. http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=3663
   
   
2. Your wizard name MUST be Taihin.
   
   
3. You MUST disable soundblaster music and enable Roland MT-32 to play this challenge. Run INSTALL.EXE before playing.
   
   
4. You MUST install Psyringe's PLIGHT improved help file to play this scenario. http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=3642
   
   
5. You MUST NOT cast the spell of mastery, you must win by world conquest.
   
   
6. You MUST send swimming lizard settlers overseas to colonize new continents. You MUST have at least 5 lizardmen cities, as soon as you can. This total of 5 includes cities taken by conquest or any other means. Do not cripple your game to do this, rather do it when it is practical considering your position on the map. As soon as you have 5 lizardmen cities, you can stop colonizing.
   
   
7. Javelineers MUST advance to within 1 or 2 squares of the enemy before being able to use their missile attack.
   
   
8. You MUST raze all cities not capable of building Maritime Guilds (or Ship Yard in the case of Draconians). This means you may only keep cities built by Barbarians, High Men, Orcs, and Draconians. You MUST NOT ever raze Lizardmen cities.
   
   
9. You MUST prioritize the construction of the Maritime Guild. Once built, you MUST build warships to rule the waves. It is recommended to keep them in stacks of 3 or 4, and patrol the oceans looking for enemy ships, flyers, or swimming troops to attack.
   
   
10. You MUST NOT enter any Desert terrain or Nomad cities with your lizardmen units. Only summoned units, mercenaries, non-Lizardmen, or heroes may enter.
    
    
11. You MUST attempt to destroy Nomad cities once you find them. It is up to you to decide how, but it must be a priority goal. Try to make up some curses for them, and shout these curses when you attack them. "From Taihin, vengeance for Daihin!" and the like.
    
    
12. You MUST prioritize the research of Change Terrain or trade for it, if you are able. Once obtained, you MUST erase all the desert squares on the map. Do this at your leisure, but you must do it when able.
    
    
13. You MUST explore every square on both worlds. How else can you rid the world of those deadly deserts, and those nefarious Nomads? Cast a lot of Earth Lore!
    
    
14. You MUST cast Water Walking on all of your summoned units, mercenaries, and heroes. Any unit in a hero stack MUST have Water Walking cast on it.
    
    
15. Choose whatever difficulty level is the most fun for you. I recommend Extreme, but all of the others are also acceptable.
    
    
16. You MUST take a screenshot of your winning screen and post it on this thread. If you lose, you MUST take a screenshot of the hall of fame (if your score is high enough to qualify).
    

• Raze all non-coastal cities even if they are of a race that can build shipyards.
  
  
• The entire 2-square catchment of nomad cities count as deserts for purposes of moving your lizard troops.
  
  
• Your new lizard cities outside your home continent MUST be founded on swamps (reminds you of home).
  
  
• Use a medium sized world instead of small. Kind of defeats the purpose of naval supremacy, but some people don't like Small worlds. This will minimize the lizardmen advantage of swimming and make warships less valuable, at the cost of making a more mundane game that is more like all of the other games of Master of Magic you ever played.