I think I've figured out my relationship between life and periods of Civ burnout. There's a correlation with real-life busyness, but inversely so. When life and work are in quieter times, that's when I get bored and look for something new in video game land. When life and work are hectic, that's when I always want to come home to a good old well-known game. I've needed to keep my mind off a few things this month, and immersiveness into Civ is the best medicine I know of for that. (Pirates! didn't work. I had to stop playing it. The problem was the dance sequences. They're so easy but so time-consuming that my mind would always wander and start thinking about stressful things again.)

http://www.dos486.com/civ4/epic21/

In case anyone didn't see this on CFC:

http://www.weplayciv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1298

Quote:Hello everyone,

We at WePlayCiv are glad to offer everyone the ability to playtest a new strategy gaming project. If you want to try something new, assist the developers in identifying gameplay and technical issues, then this is an offer for you. To become a tester, just post in this thread and you will be given access to a private forum shortly.

The project is headed by none other than Soren Johnson, the lead designer of Civilization IV, so if you were wondering what he's up to these days, here's a chance to find out.

Added later: there's no notification message when you get authorized, just look for the private forum in the Other Games section.

For those that don't know, the Zquests are rotating in a fixed cycle. The missions/bounties have begun repeating in the exact same order as they appeared from june 11th. While there are only 8 combats, they are arranged in a fixed 32-day repeating cycle. From this information, someone put up a full list of zquests until the end of the year. This is a handy resource for planning, at least until/unless some "oops" upsets the cycle again (as it did on June 11th)

Feeling like a Deity today?

This weekend is double fame/faction in heroes ascent, and this sunday also happens to be the zaishen quest for HA. That means we're looking at near 12k balthazar faction every two wins, a fast way to pile up on keys or unlocks.

Hopefully we can get some random stuff happening this weekend, but I'd like organize a meeting time on sunday, starting around 1 PM EDT, and I'll stay there till 5 PM EDT. Rotations will be welcome so don't worry if you can't come right at 1, and I have plenty of guests to draw from to fill our team if needed. We can run Searing Flames for this one more week for fast/easy wins and to keep our newcomers comfortable. If there's a space problem for the eles I'd give preference to newcomers/non-regular players so don't be shy. I'll start organizing some "real" regular teams with actual builds next week, but for now, lame is the name of the game.

The basic Searing Flames build is:

Searing Flames *
Glowing Gaze
Liquid Flame
Fire Attunement
Aura of Restoration
Glyph of Lesser Energy
Resurrection Signet
Optional Skill

Skill Template: OgBCoMzDdbs20oFIDcBAQAA

12 Fire, leftover in energy storage. Minor fire and energy storage runes, fire helm. Use survivor or blessed insignias on armor if you have it, sup vigor and vitae runes, and 20% faster cast/recharge on fire magic wand and focus.

Equipment Template: Pk5RjMz6TzfMvKSlHsMpHmYsOZYpScN5HKCsMZYtMsMpnA

We will have 6 of these eles, and the optional slot will vary depending on which one. I'm thinking of this:

1 Augury of Death (assassin), caller, 6 deadly
1 Make Haste (paragon), 9 command
2 Meteor, one going Rit with Flesh of my Flesh instead of Rez Sig (6 resto)
1 Strip Enchantment (8 blood)
1 Ward against Foes, 9+1 earth

The 2 healers will be either people already familiar with monking, or else heroes. (Yes, there's actually a not bad 2-hero-healer team.)

I just have to share these two pix.

The first shows a completely normal cottage boathouse workbench - spare propeller, various tools, work gloves, rope BUT with the addition of a garter snake basking in the sun shining in the window. A bit of surprise, indeed. And the second shows a detailled look at the snake, for those who might have not noticed it in the first pic. ;-)

I just love the juxtaposition of the classic cottage workbench mess with the sleepy intruder. No, this is not my boathouse. Yes, the owner knows about and tolerates the intruder. And yes, there have been some howls from the unwary when they realized what was beside them.

The Guild Wars 2 trailer is now live.

http://www.guildwars2.com

I was viewing a live stream from Gamescom where the trailer was first publicly screened and a couple of comments I could make out were:

1.) That's the game engine in play. What you see is how it looks in the game.

2.) Yes, that's a firearm. All the races have access to firearms.

3.) There is a great range of three dimensional movement. Players will be ducking their characters under water to combat sub surface foes.

FoxBat Wrote:I also think a little forum re-vamp could help re-emphasize our forum-based nature. Primarily we need to give visibility to scheduled events, be they variant teams, mallyx runs, MQSCs, or organized pvp. We might scurry that away in a sub-forum or set them up as stickies, but the challenge is to clearly distinguish between the currently active teams and past ones - and that seems challenging without granting some active GW players some kind of administrative powers to either move these threads, sticky/unsticky, rename, or lock/unlock. Maybe the simplest solution would be to just put a "scheduled events" post stickied in the main gw forum, with the name and time of the events (in both EDT and GMT at least), and a link to the appropriate variant or pvp threads with all the details. One person (GL?) would have the responsibility to keep this sticky updated as appropriate, removing finished events and adding new ones as they come up. On a related forum note, I don't think we should have a separate alliance forum until/unless we get the foolish idea to actually try and RUN an alliance, because it will be rare for alliance things to come up, and when they do, they ought to be clearly visible in the general forum.

I want to share games I think are unwinnable, and that At least i was not even close to win in my first try, so maybe someone can show me a way i cannot see. Here is the first one.

Mrrshans
Imposible
Medium
Five opponents.

Save attached.

Hey Wyrm, post screenies demonstrating once and for all that Searing Flames > Blood Spike.

Not all of us got to observe that giant kaboom, and I for one wanna see the results