Introduction

Analysis of the Scenario
Scoring: The scoring for this game is quite simple. On the 1900AD turn, take a screenshot of the total science and cultural output of your civilization.

Pretty straight-forward. My first observation is that it is a lot easier to get culture than to get beakers, so that will have to be an essential component of the overall strategy (once I have researched this a little further). That will probably mean playing the game a little like a Cultural game. Another observation is that the more cities you have, the more culture and beakers you will have. Hence a Domination approach will also be necessary (Uggh! Me smash!).

Scoring is only counted on the 1900 AD turn so we won’t have to worry too much about the details until we approach the scoring date itself. One thing is for sure is that we will want to be in a Golden Age. We will also need the Caste System to turn all our citizens into Artists/Scientists. And when I say “all”, I mean “all” as in no one will be working a city tile unless its contribution to culture/beakers is greater than the Specialist. Representation will be the Government Civic of choice for its +3B per Specialist. On a final note, we will need to make sure we have enough Gold on that turn to run some combination of Science/Culture with 0% Commerce (otherwise the game will automatically drop us to a % that we can afford given our treasury).

Our planned Civics look as follows. These are the Civics for the 1900 AD date and do not at all reflect what Civics we will use until the “scoring” date:
Representation: +3B per Specialist
Free Speech: +100% culture in all cities, +2C per Town
Caste System: unlimited Artists, Scientists, and Merchants, +1H per Workshop
Mercantilism: 1 free Specialist per City
Pacifism: +10% Research

We will want Representation earlier because it is so good. In fact building the Pyramids early will be part of the plan, especially with Stone, but even without. Since we are only on Prince difficulty we can afford to build Wonders without the resource doubler. None of the other Civics are particularly good early in the game so we will simply ignore them until the time of scoring is nearly upon us!

Here is where some math comes in. And despite being very good at Math (being a Physics major with a heavy Math and Comp-Sci background), I have often overlooked aspects of the scoring.

We are playing as Willem van Oranje of the Dutch who is Creative and Financial. Being Financial, we will get a +1C for any tile with at least 2C.

Town: +4C
Town (/w Free Speech): +2C
Town (/w Printing Press): +1C
Total: +7C

Farm: +1F
Farm (/w Civil Service): +1F
Farm (/w Biology): +1F
Total: +3F

When you factor in the Financial bonus, it is basically a trade-off between 3 Food for a Farm versus 8 Commerce for a Town.

There are only two Specialists we care about: Artists and Scientists:
Artist: +3g, +12Cu
Scientist: +1H, +6B

So for scoring purposes, all other things being equal, it’s clear that the Artist is better than the Scientist. The Sistine Chapel will also give us +2Cu per Specialist, and Representation will add another +3B per Specialist. This means a single Artist will yield +3B and +14Cu!

So if we go with Farms, each Farm allows us to have +1.5 Specialists per Farm. This gives us a net average of +4.5B and +21Cu per Farm.


So now we need to look at how Science and Cultural multipliers work. In both cases, all of the “static” culture/beakers from buildings, specialists and the like are added up before any multiplicative bonuses. The only thing that is not multiplied is the production conversion from hammers into gold/culture/beakers.

So what kinds of multipliers are there?
For beakers there is:
Library: +25%
University: +25%
Observatory: +25%
Laboratory: +25%
Academy: +50% (requires Great Scientist)
Oxford University: +100% (National Wonder)

Please note that the +10% beaker bonus from Monasteries no longer apply after the discovery of Scientific Method although the +2Cu does.

For culture there is:
Temple: +2Cu
Monastery: +2Cu
Cathedral: +50% (need 3 Temples per)
Broadcast Tower: +50%
Free Speech (Civic): +100%

There are a few others, but these are the basic ones not including Wonders. But the point is that each city will have a minimum of +150% culture which is more than the +100% beaker that the science buildings will give us.

Assuming +150% culture and +100% beaker, a single Artist will yield +6B and +35Cu! This in turn means that each Farm yields +9B and 52.5Cu.

I will now assume that we will have the slider on 100% Culture on the scoring turn since, on average, cities will have more culture than beakers.

The 8C from a Town will give us 8C multiplied by 150% from the culture slider giving us +20Cu. Nowhere near as good as the yield from the Farm. Not factoring city growth issues, there is no way Towns still make sense (at least not when we approach t he scoring date).


Culture
Our leader, Willem van Oranje, does not start with Mysticism so getting an early religion will be a little tougher. However, it seems that religion will play an important role in this Adventure so we will probably want to grab one of the early religions… whichever one we can get… if any.

There are a huge number of buildings and Wonders that increase Culture. Building as many of these as we can will also be a goal. The following But one Wonder is an absolute must and that is the Sistine Chapel (available with Music) which gives +2C per Specialist.


Great People
We will want as many Great Scientists as possible since they can give our best cities +50% Research. A couple of Great Prophets to build any religious shrines will also be fine. I think that we want to avoid all other Great People. If we get the free Great Artist from Music that is fine, but we want to get as many Great Scientists as possible. As such, building the Great Library will be an interim goal.


Corporations
There are a number of Corporations that give extra Culture:
Civilized Jewelers Inc: every Gems, Gold, Silver +4 culture, +1 gold
Creative Constructions: every Aluminum, Copper, Iron, Marble, Stone +3 culture, +0.5 hammers
Sid’s Sushi Co: every Clam, Crab, Fish, Rice +2 culture, +0.5 food

And some that give extra beakers:
Aluminium Co: every consumed Coal per turn +3 beakers
Standard Ethanol: every consumed Corn, Rice, Sugar per turn +2 beakers

Standard Ethanol conflicts with Sid’s due to the Rice, so we will stick with Sid’s since it is better for our purposes. So we will need one of each of the following 4 Great People to build all four Corporations: GA, GE, GM, and GS. Getting the Engineer will be the tricky part so that will need to be prioritized before any Caste System craziness starts up.


On the Game!
The starting spot isn’t amazing, but it’s ok. We have Corn, Gems, and Sugar in site. We will have 7 River tiles in city range although the city itself will not be on a River tile. We settle in place and found out capital, Amsterdam (I will leave the weed jokes for later).

I start Researching Mysticism to try to grab an early religion. I start with Agriculture which will allow me to improve the Corn. I will also be farming over the Sugar until I can get Calendar. I will want mining early as well to mine those Gems.

I decide to start with a Worker since we have several nearby tiles to improve.

After Mysticism, I head for Polytheism since there’s little chance I can grab Buddhism when not starting with Mysticism. And of course both Buddhism and Hinduism fall very early. Hmm, I think I will delay Monotheism until after some more key techs. The AI rarely grabs it early and I am no longer in a rush for a religion.

Since I popped Mining from a hut, I will grab Bronze Working next for Slavery and chopping. I also want The Wheel + Pottery, but BW is more important.

Bronze Working arrives, but there is no Copper in sight. I am a sad panda.

I decide to go for The Wheel next so my Workers don’t sit around idle. But after that I plan to head for Monotheism which will hopefully found Judaism.

My first three expansion cities have been outlined. There is a minor debate for the eastern city; should the city be just north or just south of the river. There are pros and cons to both, but all in all, it should not matter. If we were not Creative, then the southern spot would be preferable for sure.

Here is what the first three cities look like. Utrecht, my second city, would eventually become my capital since it was a money generating machine. It had founded two religions and would later become a mecca for corporate headquarters.


Ragnar, Boudica, Joao… that’s a lot of familiar faces!


Judaism is founded in Utrecht. Iron Working is up next since I’d like to have some metal and Utrecht reeks of jungle fever. I did pick up Animal Husbandry somewhere in there since I wanted to pasture the Cow tile for The Hague, my third city just south of the capital.

Since this is only Prince difficulty, we can complete the Code of Laws to Civil Service Slingshot! Woohoo! We wanted CoL anyways for the religion.

As I grow my economy, tensions are getting high all around. I notice Ragnar approaching with a decent stack. Fortunately he is just passing through on his way north towards Babylon. Going across someone else’s territory to go to war seems like a lot of trouble when there are plenty of civs right now to you looking for bruising.

Ragnar invites me into the war so I accept since I want Hammurabi’s territory for myself. In fact I plan to annex all of it.

Ragnar takes one of the Babylonian cities, but I take the rest. I have Macemen which are really overpowered at this stage in the game when the defending civs don’t have Longbows yet.

The city Ragnar took will probably fall to my culture eventually so I will just ignore it for now.


The year is now 1700 AD and the Portuguese have just been defeated. My forces will take a brief rest before conquering the Mayan lands. The entire eastern territories will be mine!

Only 70 turns remain until 1900 AD: 20 x 5 years to get to 1800 AD and then 50 x 2 years to get to 1900 AD. That’s a lot of time, but I will need to monitor this carefully to make sure I have a chance to do everything that needs to get done.


The Rest of the Game
This is the part where I had to rush through to get it done so this part of the report will be very compact.

I spread all the religions and expanded with “filler” cities where there was room, although I did not do this as early as I should have.

Spreading the religions sucked. I took over 20 screenshots of turns where only 1 or 2 missionaries out of 10 succeeded, but for brevity’s sake, here’s the final tally.


It took 74 Hindu Missionaries to spread the religion to about 38 cities… wow! This was extremely annoying and I considered stopping this adventure since I was spending way too much time trying to micro all this stuff.

There were two of Ragnar’s cities that should have flipped to me that never did. One was being overwhelmed and the territory was over 80% in my favor for 50+ turns, but it only revolted once towards the end of the game.

As you can see from the screenshot below, I spread the 4 Corporations that I mentioned above to all of my cities.


From that screenshot you can also see my 1900 AD score:
11,527 Science
51,510 Culture
63,037 Total

Note that I starved every single city on this turn such that there were 0 citizens working city tiles. If you want me to get a total were no cities would lose any pop, I can go that.

I was originally going to time the Cultural Victory to occur exactly on 1900 AD, but I got so caught up spreading the stupid religions that I dropped the idea. So the Cultural Victory came 5 turns later:


Here are the final Globe and Culture views at the end of the game.



Overall was a fun game and I liked the concept. But if I never have to spread religion again it will be too soon.

Adventure Twenty-Eight is now open for reporting. Please post your reports in the Tournament Discussion subforum.

It is at the typical location: www.kendter.com

My score at 1,900 AD was 18,922. Hopefully a decent showing. Play was to rushed as I just finished the game a couple of hours ago.

Some people were asking me about this last time, so here it is; a tutorial on how to use the Xunlai Tournament House, and recommended picks for each month.

You can find this XTH on the official website here. What this is more or less is "horse racing", without the risk! Every month, you get to pick the top 8 contenders in the Guild Battle and Hero Battle Monthly Automated Tournament. The more accurate your predicted top 8, the more "reward points" you recieve. (You can see "reward points" on the Hero panel, Account tab, next to the Hero Battle rating info.) Even guessing just a few contenders to recieve 25 reward points is extremely easy.

So, what can you do with these Reward Points? Well, if you have a permanent PvP character, you can buy cool-looking skins of weapon and armor. Or, you can make Golden Flames of Balthazar, which will give 3k Balthazar Faction to any player that uses it. But most people are interested in Zaishen Keys, which allow you to open the fabled Zaishen Chest in the Isle of the Nameless testing area, right outside the Temple of Balthazar. The Zaishen chest drops a fair number of creme brulees and firewaters, but it also drops gold items, as well as some extremely rare items like rare skins, minipets, and transmogrifier tonics. If you aren't interested in those, you can readily sell the keys to other players for 2-3k a pop using party search.

So for minimal effort, you can get free items/gold every month. You don't have to play PvP at all... you don't even have to watch PvP or keep up with the latest teams, because this thread will do it for you! I have yet to get less than 25 points (5 keys) for making predictions, and often enough gotten 50 or 75, so I'll post my top 8 picks each month, and you can simply copy them and share in the success. My top 8 basically comes from reading the top 100 player's prediction posts on forums like Guru and QQ, so they are somewhat informed. Those few others of us may have their own predictions and opinions, they are more than welcome to post their picks as well, and the rest of you can judge where to place your bets. (Just please use the full names of guilds, tags don't show in the Xunlai lists and not everyone here will know who you are talking about.) Note that you can also see a featured "PvP Predictor" choose the top 8 every month on the Guildwars.com website too.

To sign up, you need to give them a valid e-mail address through the sign-up link. (They won't spam you) Then, you need to give them your guild wars login. There is no error-checking to make sure that you entered your account name correctly, so please triple-check it, otherwise you will just be left wondering where your rewards went to. (Keep in mind, you can sign up once per account, so you can play this game multiple times if you have multiple accounts.... and reap double the rewards.) The password field is just for XTH login, it doesn't have to be your GW login password.

After signing up, you click on "make my GvG predictions" or "make my 1v1 predictions". On the left you'll see a list of qualified players/teams, which you can navigate with the arrows at top. Then you drag the player/team name into the respective slot on the right you think they will place in. You can also drag teams slotted on the right between empty slots. Click to save your predictions and you're done!

Once the tournament is finished, there is a one to two week delay before the reward points become avaliable. The Guild Wars update notes will state when they are avaliable. Then you simply need to talk to a Xunlai Tournament Agent in a port city or the Great Temple, and they will hand you your reward points. Once you have those in hand, you can speak with Tolkano [Tournament NPC] in the guild hall to spend them however you want.

Encountered 2 bugs so far, posted in FSS bug report forum already. Doesn't happen all the time, but just beware of them.

1) Items attached to mail cannot be retrieved.
http://forums.hellgatelondon.com/showthread.php?t=92716
-- Bede was able to retrieve them after relog. Didn't work for me, will try again later.

2) Mods in weapons disappeared after putting in shared stash.
http://forums.hellgatelondon.com/showthread.php?t=92713
-- Doesn't happen all the times. But I'll just unslot my mods before I put them in Shared Stash.

Day off today and was gonna log on but server is down. Turns out they are releasing patch 1.3 today! And I thought it's gonna be tomorrow since I just saw the news on FSS's website today.

Shared stash, emote and a whole hosts of new features are welcome... however, the new 3-level monster scaling mechanics in SH is going to be a problem... it'll be ok most of the times when it comes to normal mobs, but it will take much longer to kill Moloch, and to kill Desi will be a nightmare.

Last time we tried, we spawned Desi at lvl 20, and it took a full party, I believe 4 of us over lvl 40, and about an hour(?) to kill him... and he didn't drop anything good at all, I really don't see how it is possible for us to kill him now if none of us can be more than 3 lvls higher than him. No new pets for me...

News of a Hobbit movie with Guillermo del Toro's name circling around the future director's chair seems to be popping up more and more with every passing day these days.

He's left an extended riddle both on TheOneRing.net as well as on the Hellboy II forums...

http://newboards.theonering.net/forum/gf...post=89411

Quote: A riddle for you all-

Half familiar, half unknown.

A thing it is, ¨It almost is-¨

This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.

The day of the moon will be
when all is revealed to thee
Questions will cease
Answers will please
We´ll learn of the Shire
and all you desire.

At ten minus Three.
Joining to be
Ten minus Eight
Add to the slate
of the two dozen princes
that die without winces.
And add to each day of
the week.

Our current Adventure closes this upcoming Monday. Since I don't have an immediate scenario ready and willing to go, I thought I would ask the community for some input before crafting a game this week. What types of things would you like to see? Is there any particular kind of game that would draw your interest? (certain variants, leaders, civs, maps, difficulty, etc.) I can always keep coming up with more ideas, but I'd like to keep the community involved as much as possible.

To my friends, the good friends I have made here over the years:

This morning my beloved husband Charlie died of a heart attack. This was completely unexpected and I am not sure of what my next steps will be. There will be some major changes in everything else in my life as the domino effect of this proceeds.

I am surrounded by my sons. Charlie's and my own siblings are incoming to aid. The phone has not stopped ringing with condolences and offers of help.

I do not know what time I will find for online activity over the next while. Part of me will doubtless want to take some time to wreak havoc on monsters, just to keep my mind off the mountain of other tasks that await me. But there may well be little time for that either.

I did not want to go AWOL without letting you know why. Best wishes to you all, and thank you all for being the stawart friends you are.

As Sirian once said, "There's this one difficulty level, see. I've only tried it once and there was no victory. ... It's called Regent."

Charis: "I love it, great idea! I'm not sure I've ever played Regent."

Sirian: "I know it's a daunting possibility, but I think we can pull it off. At least it's worth a try, right?"

Charis: "Feel free to generate the map and start it off whenever convenient."

WOOHOO! We're finally ready for Regent!

In similar fashion, there's this one difficulty level I've never beaten in Beyond the Sword. It's called... Noble. After many games and much practice, I think I'm finally ready to give it a shot. At least it's worth a try, right?

* * * * *

Now our ancient community members (Kylearan, T-Hawk, etc.) probably already know what the catch is here. For the rest of you, I'll let you in on the variant we're going to use, and why we're going to be playing on Noble:

No tile improvements. None. Nada. Virgin landscape as far as the eye can see. Start thinking about some of the implications of that, and you'll begin to realize what a monstrous undertaking this is going to be.

While I have a few plans that will help out, I honestly do not know how we are going to win the game. There will be a real discovery factor in play here, trying to brainstorm solutions to problems that have rarely, if ever, been faced by the community. That's why I'm looking forward to this game so much.

We'll be playing as the Native Americans, for thematic purposes and because their lousy Protective trait makes for an additional handicap. I've already rolled a map that looks decent: Ice Age script, Wide Continents setting. I am looking to limit this game to FOUR players total, including myself (four has always been my favorite number for a succession game). darrelljs already has a spot if he desires it, so unfortunately that limits things even more. Usually I will go with the first signups, but for this endeavor I am going to be selective and give priority to our most experienced community members. I don't want to hurt feelings, so I'm saying that up front at the outset.

The plan is to start the game at the end of this week, depending on the level of interest from the community. Let me know what you think!