The battle was hot and fierce, and raged for many minutes. Alexander and Gorgar had foolishly attracted the attention of Kaolai's entire retinue, and much dying had ensued. But eventually, as Kaolai beheaded a jagged horror with a roar, he was decimated in the ensuing death nova.

Alexander stopped a moment to check the situation. "Someone ressurrect Liva and Liva, please. And we should probably resurrect the Master, too, ev even if he get a bit over eager a moment ago." He turned to walk, but a stopped a moment later to the deafening silence of no resurrecting happening.

"Please don't tell me the Livia twins were the only one's with res skills, " Alexander asked. Mhenlo and Togo looked on sheepishly.

"Well, we still have a few minions left. We only need to take down Vizu. Perhaps we can focus fire on him with our party of five and snatch victory yet," suggested Gorgar.

And so the badly decimated party proceeded to assault Vizu, ploughing slowly through patrols of bloated rangers before a final rush on Vizu. A lucky placement of Mark of Pain saw the majority of Vizu's Afflicted army go down in a blur of yellow fourty two's, and the ensuing soul explosions took down the rest of the minion army, together with their necromancer masters. Only Vizu, Gorgar and Alexander remained.

Time seems to slow as Vizu launched a mighty assault on Gorgar. But Gorgar did not stand by idly, and began to fire arrows so fast that his bow appear to smoke. Alexander watched in stunned amazement as Gorgar and Vizu struck one another down, then turned to clap Togo on the back as he waited for the victory cutscene to wash over him.

It didn't.

In dispair, he watched as three more high level afflicted patrolled Vizu's former playground, seemingly oblivious to the chaos that had ensured a moment earlier.

"Uh..." said Alexander. Then he closed his eyes and charged, hoping that Mhenlo and Togo would be better suited to healing than resurrection. They were. And both Alexander and Gorgar resolved to remember the value of bringing res skills on missions.

Which they promptly forgot three minutes later at the Eternal Grove.

Enjoy!

There's a number of games out there (including Guild Wars) that show stuttering and/or crashing on some dual-core systems. The problem has to do with these games bypassing the windows API to access the system clock, and not taking into consideration how multi-core alters said timings.

One age-old solution has been to force the application (or your computer) into single-processor mode. But there's a convenient alternative that allows you to skip that:

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_...er_113.zip

For my new AMD 64 X2, the GW Intro screen was stuttering like crazy. After applying this patch, smooth as silk.

Hey there. I enjoyed my first game at RBC - seen HERE in all its bloody glory - but the game was simply too tough for me. I found out about these Gentle Adventures, however, so I figured I'd try my hand, hoping for different results. How'd that go? Well, see for yourself:

Dutch Masters

For those who read it, I'd be curious to know how I can improve the presentation. Are the screenshots too big?

Also: how does one stop sucking at Civilization 4: Beyond the Sword?

We now have a realms beyond account (non subscriber) for any and all guild members to use. Account name is Realms. Password is a bit different as this game requires numeric symbols in the PW. So I will PM a few of the regulars and they can pass around the PW. Only one char at the moment "normtempwep" ..blademaster . Feel free to help level her and get the account Elite enabled. (scored NiB collectors edition from Ebay for $10 US) shipping included.

CB-13

Unfortunately, I had no time to finish, but for comparaison (and starting discussion), I would like to still post my opening (in the following posts)

Jabah

As promised, here's the report on Monday night.

http://www.dos486.com/civ4/epic19/

Edit for a scoring summary:

10 AD:
255,000 km land area
343 GNP naturally, 585 GNP cheesed

1500 AD:
740,000 km land area
17,509 GNP

Domination Victory in 1505 AD.

Epic 19 – Ronald’s report

I have not played for more than a year, but recently I got Beyond the Sword as a present and so I had to try it out. Epic 19 is my first BTS game. The scoring system should be interesting.
For Highest land area in 10 AD, I would need lots of cities, for Highest GNP very productive ones and little corruption. That’s asking for trouble and in my thinking an optimal compromise.
Highest land area in 1500 AD is probably asking for playing for a domination victory. Again, conquer the world without crippling the economy will be key. I don’t have a plan yet, but hopefully by the time I will get close I will find one.
I plan to spread my cities wider apart as normal. Since we are creative, the will grow without any cultural building so filling the space quickly.
The next interesting feature was the advanced start, something I did not even know exists. I played a few starts before the epic and decided the following:
Build a starting city. The starting location looks OK, so I will put my city there. Then build 2 settlers, 3 workers and 2 scouts. We have mining and hunting, so the workers can immediately start with mining the gold and build a camp for the ivory. Scouts and settlers will go east and west and find a good location spread out wider than usual.
Research order so that the workers have enough to do: Agriculture, wheel Animal Husbandry, then writing for early libraries.
First build in each of the 3 cities will be a warrior.
This is the starting situation:




I found 2 nice places for the 2nd and 3rd city




Until 10 AD I found only 4 more cities:
Adis Ababa (2375 BC), Yeba (1975 BC), Debra Buhan (1025 BC), Adulis (425 BC)
The original plan was to stay peaceful until at least 10 AD, but with Montezuma close by, this was impossible in this game for me. He declared the first time in 775BC: He had only 1 first wave of troops and after they could not take a city and were killed, nothing happened. I was unprepared for a counter attack, so I made peace in 525 BC. From this time on, I did not trust him at all and increased my defenders in the towns close to him. And for sure, he declared again in 350 BC. This war brought me my first Great General and I promoted one swordsman to 24HP and started the Heroic Epic in Lalibela which became my primary military production throughout the game. Nothing else happened and we made peace in 110 BC
In 10 AD my empire looks like this:




And these are the demographics: GNP: 411 Land Area: 199000




The next time Montezuma declared war was in 160 AD. This time I took 1 city (Calixthahuaca in 295 AD) before we made peace again in 400 AD.
My military became more powerful and when Montezuma declared again in 700 AD, then I was sure this would be his last time.
A quick picture about the battle for Tlaxcala:




And the map in 1000 AD




The war against Montezuma brought high war weariness throughout my empire and I had to run 60% culture at the end to keep my cities productive.
To make things worse, in 1285 Peter declares war on me and he brings in Hannibal as well. I bribe Louis XIV to fight on my side. Since Peter and I have no common border and Hannibal is very far away, these were really phony wars with no fighting for me at all.
This is the last stand of Montezuma:




After destroying Montezuma in 1305 AD I regrouped my troops to the Northwest and declared war on Asoka.
After early capturing Bagalore, Lahore, Pataliputra and Bombay, my troops were outside Delhi in 1495 AD. This was enough for Asoka to hand in his capitulation – YES, this gets me some nice add to my Land Area. I returned Bombay, but kept the other cities.
So, this is the situation in 1500 AD:







The rest was just motions, fighting with infantry against musketmen and longbows.
Declare war on Peter in 1545, he capitulates in 1560. Declare war on Louis XIV in 1605, he capitulates in 1670. Declare war on Hannibal in 1700, he capitulates in 1706.
I reached a Domination Victory after founding 1 addition city in the ice and some border expansions in 1712 AD.










A very enjoyable game. Thanks very much to the sponsor.

Since I am currently on a short notice business trip, I cannot supply my reportling and my score until the end of this week, when I am reunited with my screenshot folder.

I quite enjoyed that game. If I recall correctly I got domination around 1600 or so.

More on Friday.

mh

I started off with great excitement despite playing two difficulty levels above my usual skill level in solo games. I had a decent understanding of advanced start and made what I considered alright founding locations. But then plans failed... or should I say, I failed for lack of plans.

I really appreciate having attempted to play simply because it taught me a lot about the areas in my gameplay that I need to improve on. I did not have a clear plan for what I wanted to do, and played somewhat haphazardly.

Never actually got the chance to finish. I got into a number of wars with Monty that kept bogging down. War weariness was killing me so I coudln't push as far s I wanted.

The Indians were my only ally and unlike Lee's game, they turned out to be pretty pathetic and unhelpful. Louis dominated the wonders and techs despite his isolated starting location.

Retrospectively, I needed to be more determined in my war with Monty sooner, I should have dropped Asoka and made nice with Peter/Louis who shared religion.

Sorry for no pictures. I had a few but forgot to bring them from home today. Perhaps I will edit them in later.

Thanks for a great game, despite not finishing!