So, when I was much younger, I greatly enjoyed a game called Lords of Magic. I've been reading a bit about Master of Magic lately, and the games appear to share a lot in common. Has anyone here played both and can perhaps confirm or deny the games, similarities? I might want to buy MoM someday in the future.
Introduction Wrote:"Ring-a-ring-a-roses,
A pocket full of posies;
Ashes! Ashes!
We all fall down."
I awake with a shudder. The singing is in my dreams every night. My children's voices, before turning raw with weakness and weeping. I leave my hovel, though it is still dark outside. It is worse within.
This midden-heap of a village stinks. We are exiles, refugees, the only thing we share in common are The Death's scars. Under the starlight, all is quiet. They didn't believe me, yesterday, when I told them what I know. They don't believe me now; I am a stranger even among strangers, isolated by my knowledge.
But I know it is true.
Although the wider world those untouched, shun us, we say we are blessed by God, for indeed how else could we have sicked with The Death and yet live?
How else indeed.
They mocked me, when I told them of the Other Way; how some had bargained their souls for their lives. For wolves are strong; they do not sicken; they do not die of Death. The werewolves live, but they stalk and hunger now. I must find some way to show the others. Somehow, they will see the grave danger here. Death still has us all marked...
What was that? A gleam of light in the darkness.
They come swiftly, silently, coordinated. I draw my sword and begin to shout, but the first of the wolves leaps to my throat even as I begin to scream.
Pain. Bright light. Now darkness.
"Ring-a-ring-a-roses,
A pocket full of posies;
Hush! Hush! Hush! Hush!
We've all tumbled down."
Joesph Buckley, villager, has died.
Werewolf: The Masquerade
After talking with uberfish, who said that his hosting a big game wouldn't be able to happen anytime soon, I've been working through some ideas for the next Werewolf game to run.
So the driving idea behind this game idea is that in our games of Werewolf here at Realms Beyond, players tend to develop a style after a few games that they are expected to fall into or they will fall under suspicion. Also, there might be former players that decide not to play anymore due to bad feelings or expectations, or new players that might be intimidated by the rapport that's developed between regular players and a spotlight being on them playing for their first time. So to address some of those meta concerns, as well as to add a fun twist to the game, I'm proposing a completely anonymous werewolf game.
Each player at the start of the game will be given the login information to a profile that I have set up, that will also have a PM from me detailing their role and team. The game thread would be placed in a subforum here in the Gaming Table that will be publicly viewable, but will only allow the profiles I give out to post in it, to avoid accidental or purposeful posts under main accounts. The lurker thread would also be in a separate subforum, one that would be unviewable by anyone I don't specifically approve, so players wouldn't be able to glean knowledge of who might or might not be in the game while lurkers can still view and comment on what's going on.
Gameplay will be fairly "standard" as games here go, I'm not going to be mucking about with items or gameplay rule variations or anything, just use mostly traditional powers and let the mask of anonymity be the key 'gimmick' for the game.
The reason I'm already posting this thread with a game currently going on is that since this game would require a little extra work by players (using different profiles), I'm not completely sure that enough people will be interested to run a game. So I'm putting this up to see if enough people would be interested in playing, and if so I can start doing all of the setup work for it. If not, then I would just cancel this game setup and either present some of my other ideas that I've had for a game or let someone else host a game if they were wanting to. Also, this means I do not have a time for ending signups or starting the game yet; I'll wait and see if people are interested enough, and if so then I'll start planning that out.
Since the whole purpose is to not know exactly who you're playing with, this thread will be closed so people don't try to signup in the thread, so to sign up you need to PM me and I'll record that you've signed up. Also if you have any questions, PM them to me and I'll answer them in the thread myself for other people to see.
Werewolf Basics: (For interested new players who want a brief synopsis of what actually happens in a game)
The Big Idea
The basic idea of Werewolf is that out of all the people playing, there's a small group of betrayers trying to bring everyone else down. The betrayers are the Werewolves, sometimes called "scum" or other unpleasant names. Everyone else is in the Village, otherwise called "townies" or "innocents" or so forth.
The Village's goal is to get rid of all the scum players. They do this by taking a majority vote each game Day for who they want to get rid of. The Werewolves' goal is to outlast all of the Villagers until they control the majority vote, at which time there's nothing the Village can do to stop the scum from completely taking over. They can do this by avoiding being voted out and killing players during the Night phases following each game Day. The crowd that starts the game gets whittled down until eventually only one faction remains in the game.
So strategically, the game comes down to Villagers finding and voting out the Werewolves as often as possible. The Werewolves try to avoid getting voted out and kill off the players who threaten them at night.
Ground Rules
The role assignments - Village or Werewolf - are randomized at the beginning of each game. Players are told their alignment via private message. It is against the rules to show a copy of your Role PM to the other players - what happens in game is based on how the other players perceive you.
The game starts during the Day. Players vote amongst themselves for who should be removed from the group. The player who receives a majority vote is killed and their role is revealed for everyone to see. After that, the game goes to Night. The Werewolves is able to talk amongst themselves via a secure chat thread and may as a group murder one player of their choice. In addition, some special Village roles (see below) may have actions they may take during the Night, but most Villagers simply wait for the next Day.
The cycle of Day and Night continues until either all of the Werewolves have been removed from the game or all of the Villagers have been removed from the game. In most cases, the game can be called when the Werewolves gains veto power over the Day's vote - that is, when all of the Werewolf voting together can prevent a majority from ever sentencing one of their own.
I'm Village! What do I do?
When Werewolf is played online, even people who would be poor liars in face-to-face interactions can blend in with the other players. As a result, finding scum tends to involve finding "tells" related to what people do, rather than what they say - things like people avoiding mention of other players (who turn out to be their scumpartners) or jumping on vote bandwagons for reasons that thinly conceal how much they just want to see someone other than them kicked out come to mind.
Some other examples of behavior to watch for are the following:
"Lurking", or posting much less than usual so as to avoid notice
"Tunneling", or concentrating excessively on a single player out of proportion to what would be necessary
"Active Lurking", or continually making placeholder or worthless posts
Village players can and sometimes will do some of these things, but scum players have more motivation to do them - tunneling on a player excuses them from looking at other potential bandwagons and may allow them to distance themselves from their scumpartners, lurking and active lurking keep them from being noticed by the other players while the Village turns on itself, and so forth. Obviously if you draw Village, you want to be careful that you don't do these things or people may turn on YOU.
The important thing to remember is that Werewolf is a game of finding scum, not punishing what's considered bad play. In other words, the person who commits the most scumtells (the scummiest) is not necessarily going to be scum, and in fact may have actual scum serving them up as a justified bandwagon.
Or perhaps the scummiest player IS scum. You have to use your own judgment to decide what you believe and where you cast your vote.
I'm scum! What do I do?
The Werewolf's greatest strength and weakness - indeed, almost the point of the game - is that they already know who the scum are. On the one hand, this is great - they know almost exactly who they have to get rid of in order to win, unlike the Village who has the additional obstacle of finding the scum on top of getting them booted out. On the other hand, they have little real reason to take scumhunting seriously - they already know who the scum are, so many of the hypothetical scenarios and accusations flying around are not particularly interesting and there's little real incentive to participate. However, NOT participating will become noticeable pretty quickly, so the scum have to "fake it until they make it".
How you interact with your scumpartners is up to you or your team strategy. Working together, the team can use their collective voting power to sway public opinion in their favor. Alternatively, they can selectively turn on each other so they don't look like they're all connected. In most cases it's best to keep as many of your teammates alive, so don't actually go all the way and throw your scumpartners under the bus unless you know you'll look more like a Villager for it.
At Night, when deciding who to kill, you'll need to be on the lookout for power roles. Villagers might have roles that can catch you or block you and ruin your whole game unless you kill them before they investigate you.
As I've been posting in my pitboss IT threads, I'm planning on a new permanent server PC to provide more performance and let me use the computer for more than just serving pitboss games and emergency web/email. Some more info which may be useful but isn't vital to my question follows in spoiler tags.
My goals for the new server include...
*Serving up to six civ games and their civstats uploaders
*Running Plex Media Server for video content, including transcribing HD content for mobile devices
*Running iTunes to play audio, manage it on my mobile devices, import photos from phones, and sync photos via photo stream
*Running a web browser and Bittorrent client
*If the Roku 3 ever enables its pseudo-AirPlay functionality, the program for that
*All of the above will happen simultaneously, and at minimum the system needs to be responsive enough for me to mess with each of the programs running without stopping the others. Preferably the system will also serve as a second computer for light web browsing if a family member or guest is hanging out in the office
*All gaming, office productivity, and web-based content consumption however will happen on my primary, soon-to-be-faster PC
My plan was to cobble together a new server with some parts on hand plus some new purchases, something along to line of:
*Sandy Bridge 2500k/Ivy Bridge 3570k plus motherboard, basically whatever people who want to upgrade to Haswell are selling
*8 gigs of memory
*80gigs of SSD storage for the OS and programs
*1TB of HDD storage for media (this PC won't be used for long-term video storage, just a lot of audio plus some download->watch->delete video)
*On-board processor graphics
However a trusted friend of mine who likes to own nice Mac hardware is selling his server box, a 2008-era Mac Pro with some upgrades...
*Stock 2xQuadCore 2.8ghz Xeon Penryn-era processors
*(upgraded to) 8 gigs of weird/expensive fully buffered memory
*(upgraded to) ~1.05TB of SSD+HDD fusion drive
*(upgraded to) Geforce GT120 512mb GPU, 9500GT equivalent and not guaranteed to be faster than modern on-board video
*The prettiest computer case known to man
The Mac Pro would cost me $450. Net, either option is about the same cost after accounting for selling some spare parts. But because the Mac Pro is already assembled, and because it's quiet and so darn pretty, I'm leaning towards it. However that's only true IF I can run pitboss on it without jumping through crazy hoops.
I probably have more experience running pitboss games than the vast majority of civ players, but that's all been done on the PC. The master CFC pitboss thread has people mentioning how pitboss is PC-only, but that info is 5-7 years old.
So my question is, for a person with little Mac experience but decent PC experience, is there a workable Mac option here? Either using a Mac or Steam version of BtS, or boot camp, or a VM, or something else? Anyone have any experience? Anyone willing to try it out? Anyone able to give me ideas for what to try out on my friends Mac when I see him this weekend?
Following the ancient precedent of Imperium 5(!) this game will not begin in the year 2300, but in the year 2303 - the first year when Human forces arrive in the Vox star system.
The people of the ancient Vox civilization had long since perished, their once-fertile world reduced to a minimal husk - and human scouts soon discovered the reason why.
Random rolls are always going to have an impact in Orion, but an early Artifacts world means that a roll with too great a potential impact is virtually guaranteed. I've therefore rolled the dice in advance on this one for everybody.
There will be no Extreme or Gentle variant for this Imperium - as is, playing as Humans with a highly-advanced planetology tech in hand (not likely to be used directly, but providing production bonuses and cutting the cost of colony ships significantly) this should prove unusually gentle by the standards of Impossible games. The challenge for extreme players is intended to arise in part from competition with other players to maximize your scoring. (That said, this is Master of Orion on Impossible difficulty. Don't take anything for granted!)
[EDIT: This is pretty much standard now, but it's fine to play this Imperium using EITHER the regular 1.3 game OR kyrub's 1.40M patch. They do play somewhat differently, but not enough to make an overwhelming difference - not as much as certain early random events or AI decision die-rolls, for instance....]
Anyone knows where I can download/buy Master of Orion original version (v1.00 I believe it was)?
I remember myself playing it 15 or more years ago, I really would like to try it again. One thing I really loved about that version was the fact that the council vote automatically formed alliances. It seriously affected diplomacy with the AIs and it led to two three ways alliances each one led by the two council candidates. Of course it had some bugs, like the AIs send countless fleets to meet their doom at Orion.
I'm going away Monday 1st of July and back on Thursday the 4th next week, I'm looking for someone to play my turns as the Kuriotates in EITB 28.
We're on turn 46 now, and the turns are still short enough to only take a few minutes. I don't think I'm about to be imminently DoW'ed and I'd leave directions for anyone who does take over.
![[Image: rbo-imp38-teaser4.jpg]](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nscOCzO8zFw/WjuwcU5gwtI/AAAAAAAAEJI/auWTy6AZqAcdSxi_FXI_pmn04ca-nHl3wCLcBGAs/s1600/rbo-imp38-teaser4.jpg)
![[Image: rbo-imp38-teaser5.jpg]](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FDFBLm32rzQ/WjuwcqcnGbI/AAAAAAAAEJM/EnUuEOys0IwI1fyTo5gfjOYWM4pvUAmxgCLcBGAs/s1600/rbo-imp38-teaser5.jpg)
and I'd leave directions for anyone who does take over.