Heya all someone might recall the Liq name but doubtful!

BTS dragged me back into CIV4 after WL just killed my interest. Am really liking this expansion though it's never all roses now is it.

One major issue I'm running into is War Weariness around the gunpowerder age on. In the ill fated Boff-01 SG fighting an almost purely defensive war against sury resulted in WW ranging well over 700 in a very short time. Very little loss of life on our side and no towns lost, only those of his vassal gained. The WW just kept skyrocketing as sury suicided stack after stack of troops unpon the walls. 50+ Turns of peace later and WW was still over 400.

Keep in mind that neither sury nor his vassals had the SOZ, that was hammy's, whom sury had been in a war with for centuries. Despite all that time fighting, nether AI had WW hitting over double digits.

Just not a whole lot of solutions when teching up to rifles still yet WW is flowing in full bore. Really have no idea as vanilla was never this bad.

So honestly SOZ is just a broken wonder that you build solely for denial purposes. It gives the player no active benefit but is just crippling in the hands of the AI. Ya ok bashing the wonder, that's not too far a stretch, but is WW as a whole just broken or am I missing something.

If it is indeed not properly balanced, are the powers that be planning on patching it?

I am fully prepared to accept noob status for posting btw haha.

Cheers!
-Liquidated

Pregame thoughts - the immediate one is OCC, not surprisingly. Is it possible with these restrictions though? Specifically, the national wonders question is the big one, although on second thought it is greatly simplified by the fact that 3 of the big 5 I normally use in BTS (NE, Globe, NP, Oxford, IW) won't be available as they take a certain number of buildings. So - can I win with just the NE and NP? The beauty of OCC of course is that you can do a test game in a couple hours or less and I got one to a space-winning position. However, there were a lot of lucky breaks in that one, I was isolated but had stone at the start (and generally great terrain) so could easily get up the GW and Pyramids. Isolation seems to be key with aggressive AI's; by the time they can attack you there's lots of sucking up/bribing options to keep out of war.

Looking at the teaser screenshot - lots of forest is extremely good, eight coastal tiles with only two seafood is not. I will try the OCC with moving inland to attempt better locations.

After moving around a bit, a plan takes shape:

Something I've often wished I could try in OCC, where seafood is good (as always) but ordinary water tiles are pretty much junk. So I can, at some point, build a 2nd city to give me a WB; I will probably wait until it can build wealth/research after that. The clams will be good eventually but no rush, pigs and corn have me more than covered for now. This is really very good as OCC sites w/o stone or marble go, I would maybe like one more hill for early production but it's strong, very few plains, lots of forest. Soon I meet Monty (joy!) and I can tell from EP that there's at least another AI around too. And it turns out to be Toku! I was expecting that Compromise might stack the deck with especially aggressive AIs....what worries me is that Monty did not found one of the early two religions, if he had it would've been possible to adopt it and maybe befriend him before he attacked (That was my thought at the time, later I realized that with every AI starting with Mysticism the first religions could wind up anywhere). The good news is I won't have to worry about barb defense too much.

Later I run across Ragnar as well. I may be going down in flames, but I'm not changing the plan now! Pyramids started in 2200BC.

I've trained 3 archers, 2 to guard the north from barbs and 1 for MP duty.

Stonehenge isn't built until 1600BC by Toku. The lateness of that date pretty much guarantees that I will have no problems with the mids.


Let's hope they keep it up.

Of course there are downsides:

Doesn't this poor fool know I nothing but a handful of defensive units? I refuse and am unhappy to find out that gives -2, not -1, putting Toku into Annoyed also. Someone Oracles Christianity too. Can my continent get a religion please? Soon after Confu is founded somewhere else as well. Pyramids done in 850BC, the first piece of the (quasi)OCC space race in in place.

Soon after, toku asks for a DOW from me AGAIN. They should really only allowed to do this once per war! He's not the only one not happy with me:


Oh come on Monty. You know how much heat I took to not declare phony war? Boo....
As I frantically train unpromoted archers, I am happy to see by borders expand for more defense, then...the stack doesn't invade? What? The horns sound...and it's Ragnar DOWing the Aztecs! The timing is like something out of a movie. Ragnar is now my official Best Buddy for the rest of the game.

That amazing luck is followed by more bad news, I get crowded in from the north much earlier than I expected. I was originally going to settle on that southern coastal sugar, but now it will get close borders penalties with Toku...oh what the hell, he's gonna hate me forever anyways (see the problem with this pattern of pissing him off?). Sparta goes up (kind of strange for Pericles to control just Athens and Sparta, isn't it?):

Do I have a death wish? Most certainly. Every religion but Islam is gone so there is little chance of faith calming relations in the neighborhood (the loss of Pacifism is a blow too, although there's not that much difference between 3 and 4 times normal GP production). Since I met Monty first I had been assuming that he would border me, so I had been sort of trying to stay on his good side with resource deals. Clearly with Toku being the one to wind up next to me I'm in longterm trouble as he is one of the hardest to befriend.

It's Closing Day for Adventure Thirty "The Simple Life" . Please feel free to post your reports in the "Reports and Discussion" forum. I'm looking forward to seeing how people fared!

Guess I have better clean up my stash, NOW ;p

Quote: As some Hellgaters may have noticed, in-game mail has been hanging around in inboxes past their expiration dates. Some players have hit the inbox size limit for mail with attached items and can’t receive any new attachments as a result. To fix this, we will be activating in-game mail purging on the Shulgoth (US) and Sydonai (EU) servers starting next week.

Here is the planned schedule:

• Monday, June 16th: All in-game mail that was sent during the month of April will be purged, regardless of its current “X days left (until expiration)” state.
  
• Monday, June 23rd: All in-game mail sent before May 15th will be purged, regardless of its current “X days left (until expiration)” state.
  
• Monday, June 30th: We will turn on automatic purging to match the displayed expiry date in players’ inboxes. Mail which shows “0 days left” will be removed within 24 hours.
  

If you have any further questions on this topic, please post them here.
-- Scapes

Yep it's cheesy to allow mobs to spawn right at entrances, boss mobS even. What is worse is there are some entrances hiden just behind a wall so there's no way to tell if the entrance is trapped until you step out. King William Street is one of these deadliest traps.

A lot of quest bosses are spawn near or by the entrance (supposedly save you from having to search for them!?) and we have examples of that as early as early act1. What makes King William Street deadly is that the two side quests you get together (Demon of Notoriety - Kill Mutilator and Daddy's Dead - Kill Morbat) on your way to Cannon Street Rail spawns the two bosses together grouped as one. Two times now they spawned right outside at the entrance on the other side of the wall. Both time, AliceBrock and 10FeetTallAlice barely escaped with ~200/1000 HP. That's escaped, quit the game - within 2-3 seconds of stepping out.

Morbat - Screecher - Phasing and fire field attack
Mutilator - Releases balls of electricity when hit.
Tough combo

Anyone has the two quests coming up want to test if it still spawn both bosses if only one of the quest is taken? That might be the wiser way to go, taking one of those quests at a time.


KoP

What are your thoughts of using Nukes (human on human) in a multi-player PBEM (Play by email) game?

I had to laugh out loud

Here they are, with apologies for the lateness:

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/epic19results.html

By general consensus, I used the "normal" GNP numbers rather than the cheesed ones, wherever both were provided. The land and GNP figures for the first (10AD) scoring benchmark were very close in both cases, with a mere 27 tiles separating first from fourth in land area! By 1500 AD, things were spaced out quite a bit more. Also of interest, every single player scored a 10 point first place finish in at least one category, except for mostly_harmless - and he had three different second-place results! Very neat stuff, everyone.

I hope you all had fun, and find the results useful in terms of comparing notes.

This past weekend was a double faction weekend for Fort Aspenwood and The Jade Quarry and I'm pretty sure it went unnoticed by most people in the guild, as well as most people in GW. However, I was bored and since it's nigh impossible to get even 4 people for AB/TA these days I decided to play them and, to my surprise, enjoyed them more than I thought I would. Here are some of my thoughts from this past weekend.

Fort Aspenwood:
Aspenwood is decidedly skewed in favor of the Luxon side, since all you have to do is kill a bunch of Kurz NPCs, using the rather potent firepower of the Siege Turtles as artillery support; whereas the Kurz have to defend the Fort from the siege as well as run amber in order to increase the speed at which "God's Vengeance" is completed. That's right, there is no easy victory for the Kurz, you have to sit there and wait for the thing to complete on its own. As a result, the Luxon side is a lot more populous than the Kurzick side and therefore people on the Luxon side will have a longer wait to get in. It's not bad, but when there were 2 districts (it never went beyond 2, though) you could wind up sitting in the outpost for 5-6 recharges (about 3 minutes) before going in.

The biggest problem with Aspenwood, as well as every other randomly picked team assignment in the game (and probably other games as well) is people that will just leave the game, either before it starts or in the middle of it. During the weekend I'd say about half the games I played had at least 1 person leave. By Sunday night (i.e. the last few hours of the event) it was unplayable since I was unable to join a game without anyone leaving. Several times more than one person would leave and by that point it would be impossible to win since the Kurz could easily swarm the turtles and kill them before they had a chance to get into the fort. At those points all you could do is forget about the mission and just kill whatever Kurz came along, even if you wound up fighting the same people 10 times in a row. I'm not exactly sure why ANet seems to love random teams so much, but it's become very detrimental to GW gameplay and one of the biggest reasons these missions (as well as all the others: RA, Dragon Arena, Snowball, etc.) are not taken seriously by anyone. In my opinion it would be far better for the mission if you could pick teams, and be able to go in with at least some semblance of a plan.

One of the things you have to take into consideration with the random assignment is that you can't really depend on your teammates to do anything other than c-space gaming; however, I did find that if the Kurz had taken over one of the amber mines several Lux would break off the assault (unless we were already in the area attacking Gunther) to recap the shrine. Unfortunately, having a monk on your side was not always a guarantee, so you have to create your own build to make do without one. I started out as a channeling/resto rit in order to provide support for the turtles, but after having troubles with interrupt rangers that were able to keep the turtles outside the base just by interrupting the siege attack (annoying, to say the least), I decided to change my tactics and switched to a water ele with glyph of immolation + steam for blind, using Shatterstone for damage. This actually worked out quite well for me and wound up being the build I stayed with for the rest of the weekend. You don't need a res for this mission since you auto-res after 3-5 seconds, nor do you need a run skill since the distance between the Luxon starting location and the inside of the Fort is very small. There is also no death penatly here, so dying isn't really a big deal (and can be beneficial at times).

This was the bar I ended up with:
Water: 14, E Storage: 11, Healing: 8, Fire 3
Glyph Of Immolation, Steam, Shatterstone, Glowing Ice, Freezing Gust, Water Attunement, Healing Seed, Healing Breeze

The build worked rather well and I was able to deal a nice amount of damage with the Shatterstone -> Freezing Gust combination (or by using Glowing Ice if I wanted to conserve energy). I found out, as the battles wore on, that the glyph + Steam combination was a nice source of damage to spellcasters and not just useful for the blind vs. physical attackers. If I wanted to get an NPC kill in and there were no monks on our team, I would glyph + steam, then Shatterstone + freezing and finish with Glowing. The damage was enough that if anyone else was targetting the NPC (or if I got a second Shatterstone off) it would kill the NPC. The triple hit from a Shatterstone combination is also nice for dealing a decent amount of damage through prot spirit. The only time I would have energy issues would be if I was spamming Shatterstone + Freezing without being killed for a while. It got to be pretty annoying once or twice when I would want to be killed for the energy recharge but people wouldn't target me, or I would still be able to kill them even with depleted energy reserves. Sigh. There were a couple times where I was about to die and got a Shatterstone off, which would kill someone with its second hit right after I died. That was kinda cool.

---

The Jade Quarry:
I think I should mention this first: before this weekend I had never gone into the Jade Quarry. At first it was because I was always more interested in Alliance Battles and not the competative missions, and after a while doing the Jade Quarry became impossible since, well, nobody ever goes there. The latter didn't really change much this weekend: there was never more than 1 district with no more than 15-20 people in it at a time; however, there were enough people that you could get a game in without much of a wait. There is no definite advantage for any one side and the game is played out in a somewhat similar method to Alliance Battles in that you have to capture certain areas and those will lead to you scoring points. When you control a quarry site, a turtle (or juggernaught if you're on the Kurz side) with spawn to carry a piece of jade back to your base, scoring you 1 point. Along the way are several archer shrines which you can capture in order to add more damage to your side and to help kill the carriers. The first team to 10 points (or whoever has more points when time runs out) wins.

One thing worth noting about the shrines here (and in Aspenwood as well, but it's less important for Aspenwood) is that shrines aren't capped the same way they are in most other situations, most notably Alliance Battles. In order to cap a shrine all you have to do is kill all of the NPCs guarding that shrine and it will change hands automatically. You can have a rather interesting time if there are 2 AoE eles on opposing sides capping a shrine over each other. I actually had 1 match where I basically stood in one place recapping a shrine against a Splinter Barrager - the shrine was changing hands so fast that most of the time the NPCs there didn't live long enough to do anything. It was quite humorous, albeit slightly annoying.

Leavers are another big problem with this mission - much moreso than with Aspenwood. Losing just 1 person on your team can cost you the match. The last few matches I played were lost because people were leaving. I had to stop Sunday night after several matches in a row where people would just leave, my last one being a match where 4 people (half the team) left and it was impossible to even leave the base because of how one-sided the match became (side note: this was the match where I sat in the base and exchanged taking over the NPC shrine with the Barrage guy). I'm not sure why so many people feel the need to just quit a mission in the middle of it, but it is seriously annoying. Perhaps harsher penalties are needed to discourage the action (such as having your account suspended for 10 min every time you do so) or maybe more incentive for people to stay around (i.e. better lucky loser bonuses - you would get 1600+ faction for winning, maybe give half that for losing?). Side track: I have noticed that people will be more likely to leave the more one-sided the battle is.

Much to my surprise I found I enjoyed this mission moreso than Aspenwood, if only because it was a more even fight. The goals are easy to pick up on and once you get the hang of it the mission becomes very playable for people of all skill levels, which is a mixed blessing. After my first match it became pretty obvious that the water ele I had been using for Aspenwood was not really appropriate for here since AoE shrine capping wound up being more important. I quickly changed to a Savannah Heat build and never looked back.

My build was:
Fire: 14, E Storage: 11, Healing: 8
Savannah Heat, Searing Heat, Teinai's Heat, Immolate, Glowing Gaze, Flame Djinn's Haste, Fire Attunement, Healing Breeze

I used the same equipment for this as I did with the water build, only changing the double 20/20 wand/focus, the +15/-2 focus (I just used the water wand with +15/-2 since there's no attribute req for the energy) and the headpiece. I also didn't bother lowering Healing for more E Storage because, well, energy wasn't an issue at all with this build (with either build, really).

One of the things I found with this mission was that, while the area is small enough, having a run boost helps with getting to and from the shrines when you need to do so in a hurry. Another thing I noticed with this mission was that the people in it were really... not very bright... I was able to kill other players by stacking Savannah Heat and Searing Heat on them - they would not move out of it. At first it was humorous, but after a while it became disappointing - I would have liked a bit more competition from my opponents. One match there was a Thunderclap ele that was more annoying than anything (which, having "Annoying was" in their name made it obvious that that was their goal) but, unfortunately, they were easy to deal with. All they would do is Thunderclap someone and then spam Shock Arrow and Lightning Javelin. They also seemed to like targetting me for some reason, so there were a few times where all I did was dodge the projectiles and draw them back to an NPC shrine where they would quickly die. Or, if there was a teammate around I would just stand there dodging and let my teammate kill them. Or, if they targetted someone else, I would dump Savannah Heat on them and they wouldn't move (like I said, very few people actually moved out of the AoE).

Having a monk on your side isn't really neccessary as most people won't bother targetting the carriers, partly because they don't show up on the party window. Even so, it's more important to make sure you have control of the mines so your own carriers can earn points. The extra shrines are almost as important to have since those Longbows are perched above the floor of the map where the mines are, which means that, while they won't engage until something enters their aggro or attacks them, they will be able to continue attacking even if someone runs away, thanks to their longbow + height range. If I forgot to use Healing Breeze on myself when going after a shrine of 3+ rangers, well, I died. Also of note: the mesmers you have to kill at the mines have some nasty anti-caster stuff, so zerging them isn't really that great of an idea.

Overall, I think I had more fun in The Jade Quarry than I did in Fort Aspenwood, if only because there was more to do than just follow the turtles and kill any blue dots that came close. In the end, I earned enough Balthazar Faction for ~6 Zaishen Keys and ~7 faction donations.

No, it's not the resurrection of Epic 15, it's the new "game experience" from Firaxis, details here. It does look like it's got more to it than a free mod, but I guess it depends on the price and the gameplay as to whether it's worth buying. Maybe a demo will help make one's mind up.

And I know makes more financial sense to get your designers to make new "game experiences", but they'd make me happier if they made a patch to fix the issues that the last BTS patch broke.