Hi all

This is just a small note to let y'all know about the wedding of my brother Thomas to his lovely wife Kari, which was held at Winona, MN last Saturday afternoon.
I will also use this blog to record my travels in the USA, a cycling tour of various states in the west.

Moriah's latest blog activities

Yours,

Moriah.

What game plan to do? I went for early space finish in Epic 17 so I will try one of the other two. Deciden for domination; Zara's traits line up pretty well (and there's ivory at the start). Culture would be interesting, but going for really fast culture win is risky, and his traits don't line up very well with it. Also, the culture win doesn't line up well the 2ndary scoring categories for land and GNP at the benchmark dates. So I will try Domination. Of course, a well played Domination game could result in missing the 1500 dates also.

Advanced start thoughts:
We have 765 points to spend...as I posted here , the rules of the system are such that buying techs is a total nonstarter. Emphasizing settlers and workers, and buying scouts with what's left over, seems to be best.

Now the problem is that your visibility is limited. Check the game's page here for your starting area. Of course, the red circle will be a good capital site, but the rest is kind of dodgy. North, a city on the river near the corn will be good cottage location, but it sure would be nice to know what the terrain north is! You can buy settlers instead of cities but there is a limit of 2 units per city (if the limit wasn't there buying settlers instead of cities past the first would be a pretty obvious move to avoid the lack of knowledge when picking a site problem).

EDIT: I'm am idiot. The 2 unit per city limit only applies to scouts and warriors (and presumably other units, if you buy Archery or pop it from a hut when placing a city). You can buy a single city and load it up with as many workers and settlers as you have points for, which is probably the best strategy. Hat tip to Ronald to pointing this out, check his report for a better opening.

You can buy visibility, but you need to reveal a lot of tiles to really decide where the best locations for cities are so that's generally out. And coast on the southern edge is a big warning against guessing - if I placed a city in the north and missed a good resource I'll probably be able to adjust a future dotmap and grab it later. But if there's seafood in a position where only a couple of city locations can grab it, guessing about where to place one in the south could lose the seafood altogether. How to go about this?

Assuming no buying of pop points (doesn't seem that useful as they'll be working unimproved tiles), your starting cash can buy
3 cities/settlers, 3 workers, 2 scouts
OR 4 cities/settlers, 1 woker, 3 scouts

With the former, you need to deploy all the settlers to avoid the 2 units/city. With the latter you can save one settler unbuilt. I lean towards the latter as with our starting techs of hunting/mining there's not a ton for early workers to do - that gold mine is a big priority but other than that the main thing is getting cities growing first, not providing hammer tiles. So I think starting with 1 worker and having some of the other cities build worker first is a decent option. I've also found in some test games that having multiple early scouts is extremely good; the AI doesn't seem to pop huts effectively (if I read the XML right, they normally get 2 archers + 1 scout on emperor; my guess is that AIs don't buy scouts, esp if they don't start with hunting). So you can pop a lot of huts with multiple scouts, also given that you are going to pay some maintenance starting with 3 or 4 cities, the gold you pop from huts can be used immediately rather than waiting for your 2nd city.

So I still need to pick 3 locations. The blue circle seems to be significantly improved in BTS so I'm willing to take some chances, but the blue circle SE of red looks bad being one off the coast. I decide to stick with red circle.

I decide to take a chance on the NE blue circle. If another food source is revealed, I will place the 3rd city 1W of the northern corn; there will be a lot of overlap but with an aggressive playstyle that won't matter. Well here goes:



Darn, the cow is nice but the horde of plains tiles, not so much. I decide I want more info before deciding on another city to work that corn. So for the third, I go to the green highlight square. it can work the sheep (visible in the original start but covered by the toolbar in the above picture) and get those plains hills (hopefully there is another +food square so I can work both, as the sheep is only going to be 3/2/1).

I hope some of the other players record their though processes in detail instead of just placing the cities and showing a SS of turn 1, as this is uncharted territory for me.
Result: Well, not great but it'll do. The two non-capital cities were always kind of stunted, I would wind up stagnating Lalibela (which had low food) at size 6 or 7, where it could work the hills and horses for good early-game production. Gondar generally wound up working cows, corn, plains hill, and the ivory, then whipped mercilessly whenever it grew larger. I popped a hut for a map, showing a lot of nothing. One scout in each city, settler in Lalibela (going to use him to explore that jut of land before animals appear).


And...we're off!

As the title says, the next Epic will open on this upcoming Monday (June 9th). Due to several requests, the next game will be a variation of Sirian's Stagnation game scenario. That also means the setup has taken a little longer than usual, so thanks for your patience.

Epic Nineteen is now open for reporting. Please post your reports in the Tournament Discussion subforum.

It can be found in the usual area.



www.kendter.com/epic19-1.htm

Hello everyone,
I'm a lurker on the CivFanatics forums who found this group after reading several of Sullla's fascinating game reports. I've been playing a fair bit of Diablo II again lately, but don't have any sort of group to play the game with - local friends don't have the time to commit to the game, and trying to blindly make friends on b.net is .
With the Nature's Cabal team's recent success, I was wondering if there were any similar team goings-on I could join.

I don't know if everyone is Diablo-ed out at this point, but I figure there's no harm in asking, right?

I stumbled on a recent Youtube video and geeked out when I saw it...
[url="http://R2%20Builder%27s%20Club%20http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHpZLGBr4r0&feature=dir"]
[/url]R2D2 Builder's Club

It's basically a quick look at a gathering of R2D2 model building enthusiasts nd there are numerous links to other clips of more of the models.




Following links I also found a cute little number.

And chuckled over Darth Vader being a smartass.

Before I post the proposed game, I'd just like to point out that this one is ripe for disaster. It could very well be a total flop. It could also be incredibly fun. It will come down somewhat to the players invovled. There is no real way to think of all the potential abuses, and I haven't really tried. Please, if you are interested in this type of game, go into it without the intent of gaming the rules to win .

Darrell

I thought I would at least mention this here: Guru is holding their own version of the rawr cup (aka player run tournament as opposed to ANet run) but with 5 divisions instead of 3, with the lowest being geared towards PvE guilds that wanted to enter a GvG tournament. The official details can be found in this thread if you want to read up about it. I'm not sure we can muster an entire team given the current activity levels in the guild, but I thought it's something people might be interested in checking out.

The breakdown:
Date: Saturday, July 12
Divisions/prizes:
- Primier: Compaq Laptops ($1000 value... sorry, $999.99)
- Gold: Portable DVD players
- Silver: 4GB Samsung Digital Mutimedia Devices
- Bronze: Duffel bags with GWGuru logo on them
- Casual: Team Love* T-shirts

* For those that don't know, Team Love is a mentoring program run by top 100 players in an attempt to train/improve the GvG player base.

THESE PANTS went for [size=5]$10,250,000 Palladium

[/size]Too bad I was late for the auction. These pants would have been awesome for my melee engineer, DudeNukem. Oh well, I remain a nub, but 10 millions richer

To put things in perspective, I have around 300k if I pool all my toons' gold together.

KoP