Having finally overcome the epic challenges of the desert, Nudists have ascended and earned their right to new powers in their struggle against the anti-indecency clothed mursaat fops. We begin at the Dragon's Lair and march onward towards our ultimate victory in Hell's Precipice.

Any character may freely join in our quest on Tuesdays starting at 8:30 PM EST, so long as they follow these rules during our team game:

- No armor except for a holiday hat
- Only candy-cane weapons/shields/foci and their equivalents are permitted (bananna scythe, gingerbread, or those crafted in Shing Jae/Kamadan). These items cannot be upgraded in any way.
- Only DP-erasing consumables are allowed. (Morale boosts are not allowed.)
- No title-based skills (PvE-only)

These rules may be revised later if the team deems it appropriate.

Or maybe be flattered...

http://www.warblade.as/index.asp

In any case, you've taken on a new identity as (to quote the website), "...a PC arcade game with focus on very good playability. It's a shoot'em up type of game like the old classic arcade game Galaga. Warblade is a PC remake of my old Amiga game Deluxe Galaga. A very popular shareware game for the Amiga computer"

I can see the resemblance, yeah!

This sparked a rather lengthy thread over at the offical forums (mucho math included) Linky> http://forums.hellgatelondon.com/showthread.php?t=85404

Also a note that Scrapes(community manager) over there has started renaming posts over there with the Tag <New Insights on .....> when there is new info to be shared.

Quote :

Critical damage is a damage multiplier that applies when you proc a critical hit. As such, it is added to your current damage multipliers (such as those found on mods or affixes). The formula would look like this:

BASE DAMAGE + (BASE DAMAGE x (CRITICAL MULTIPLIER + DAMAGE MULTIPLIER)) = CRITICAL BASE DAMAGE

Something worth noting. Elemental damage multipliers like "Adds 7% Toxic Damage" are not applied to BASE DAMAGE. Instead, they have their own formula.

ELEMENTAL DAMAGE + (ELEMENTAL DAMAGE x (CRITICAL MULTIPLIER + DAMAGE MULTIPLIER)) = CRITICAL ELEMENTAL DAMAGE

To provide an example:

BASE DAMAGE = 100
CRITICAL MULTIPLIER = 300%
DAMAGE MULTIPLIER = 20%
ELEMENTAL MULTIPLIER 1 = 5% Toxic
ELEMENTAL MULTIPLIER 2 = 5% Toxic
ELEMENTAL MULTIPLIER 3 = 10% Spectral

A = 100 + (100 x (3 + .2)) = 420
B = 5 + (5 x (3 + .2)) = 21
C = 5 + (5 x (3 + .2)) = 21
D = 10 + (10 x (3 + .2)) = 42

A + B + C + D = 504 = TOTAL CRITICAL DAMAGE

Or - ask not what your monk can do for you, but what you can do for your monk!

Of late we've fallen into the typical and boring "careful aggro - one tank - nuke" methodology given the insane amounts of damage non-tanks are taking, plus having only one monk for a while. This slows progress down because you need to give time for the careful pulls, as well as recovering from the inevitable mistakes when aggro breaks. But now we have much more power at our fingertips with skills from every campaign, and our team should consider ways to break out of this mold so we can simply roll over our enemies with relative speed and safety.

Zero armor necessarily implies a lot of damage if unprotected, and while me and Zed are cooking up energy-efficient healers with elites like Healer's Covenant, Zealot's Defense, Offering of Spirit etc, we still need to somehow mitigate the huge incoming damage to make keeping people alive more reasonable. This job needs to be distributed throughout the entire team, so this thread is meant to brainstorm ways that can be done, which can then be incoporated into our own builds as the situation demands.

One simple thing we should consider is everyone just bringing at least one good self-defense skill, especially if you're a frontliner but even midliners as well. I don't mean a slow heal like Troll Unguent, the backline should have that part taken care of with energy-efficient builds. I'm talking mitigation such as block stances like natural stride, lightning reflexes, disciplined stance, soldiers defense, critical defenses, and so on. There are assassin "escape" tools like return, death's retreat, and feigned neutrality in this vein as well. Eles can get a decent armor boost (at a mobility cost) with a modest earth investment (or perhaps even water now). Modest armor boosts are also avaliable from rit pots like Mighty was Vorizon or Protective was Kaoli. There are also some protection enchantments like Shield of Absorption which are especially efficient on a dervish. Blocking or increasing armor are important since unprotected, one can take 100s of damage at this point; not something you want to rely on healing to clean up every time.

We can also consider team-wide protection roles. Stand Your Ground is probably the best bet for consistent team-wide armor, although two copies are required for constant uptime, and it's hard to keep up the energy without characters like paragons, necros, or eles. It also needs to be kept in mind that armor isn't going to stack anymore. They're On Fire is very effective if we have fire eles, but it requires a paragon primary. Shields Up! is extremely useful against archer hordes, but requires two or three people to keep it up in a chain. (Though even +60 armor half the time isn't bad!) Rits or Rangers can try defensive spirit spam, which gets somewhat trickier with the energy limitations. Aegis chain is another possibility, which is most manageable on eles with their large pools and glyph; the paragon sister skill Defensive Anthem is also avaliable. A traditional bonder may also work if we can push the energy pool up enough to make a large number of enchants more manageable. Eles also have the various ward spells to keep a midline and backline happy.

In PvE we also have the venerable "distractor" roles of ally creatures. A single pet isn't much protection, but it is a little. A team full of pets does the job better. With the increased kill speed nudists should now have at their fingertips, the venerable Minon Master becomes more viable. Efficient spells like bone minions can be paired with either of the corpse-less elite summons, Jagged Bones and Flesh Golem, for added resiliance. Bone Minions are actually an energy gain skill with reasonable soul reaping, so the MM can use that energy to fuel other roles like curse shutdown, or even spamming protective spirit. Or, you can get a ritualist on this job with consume essence for e-management, and they can put out even harder to kill minions than a (rune-less) necro could.

Finally there is the shutdown route. The latest necro changes have rendered weakness riduclously cheap to spam everywhere, and cuts the armor-respecting portion of damage down to a mere third. It's hard to imagine a time when we *shouldn't* be running this with a necro around. There's also AoE hexes such as meekness, shadow of fear, and reckless haste. Mass blind is also possible through either eruption, or various other skills combined with epidemic. Daze + epidemic is the potent counterpart for controlling spellcasters, as long as you have enough physical damagers to trigger the daze. Mesmers have some AoE tools now (clumsiness, arcane conundrum) for slowing down the incoming offense, and interrupts are versitle and good for nabbing those devestating earthquakes and the like. There are also other "fire and forget" interrupt styles like Maelstrom or choking gas spam. Frequent knockdowns are another potent way to protect ourselves, such as constantly chained earthshakers and counter blow.

Whatever route we take in defense and offense, energy is at an obvious premium with only two pips and 20 pool. Candy cane items are legit now, and that inclues the gingerbread focus and it's whopping +5 energy. Any caster can raise their pool by 30 with only 6 points in communing by taking Mighty was Vorizon; this is especially useful for healers who need more energy at the start of a fight and less as the enemies drop, as well as necros who benefit from a higher ceiling to store all that soul reaping energy. We may similarly have empowerment on us at times, which makes any rit item grant +10 energy and +50ish health. There are a number of good energy elites between mind blast, elemental attunement, offering of spirit/blood, defender's zeal etc. that are sometimes overlooked on normal characters, which are far more useful for us. Auspicious Incantation is a great skill for casting those longer-reacharge and expensive 25e spells like eruption or maelstrom. We can also employ not only Blood ritual but Blood is Power on the team for a constant energy supply.

If we can ever manage to get some physical attackers on the team they will probably need to spam attack skills to be effective, and look to tools such as Zealous Vow, Soldier's Endurance, energy-gain dagger attacks + critical strikes, or Expertise to keep themselves going.

So as we go forward from here, let us please take team survivability into consideration. Make life on your monks easier, and we can eliminate the need for a "pure tank", have all our characters contributing both to offense and defense, and hopefully find ourselves taking fewer dirt naps. And please append any more ideas you have for protecting our team!

I decided to rush the Mongols. They decided to rush me. Guess which of us turned out to be an incompetent idiot.

PS Sorry about posting this late, but I was working late on Monday, and yesterday I realized that I didn't even keep saves, so I can't post the screenshot of my mini-stack of Horse Archers and Chariots being destroyed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/19/books/...ke.html?hp

Ancient Age
I decide to settle in place not seeing anywhere that could be better. Start off building a Worker since we are Expansive (+25% Worker production) and to quickly improve the Cow tile. I research Animal Husbandry first to that effect.

Warrior pops a hut for Pottery. Very nice! Once Istanbul, the capital, finishes a Worker, it begins work on a Granary (thank you Pottery!). Normally I would build a Warrior here, but the difficulty is only Prince, and, being Expansive, we build Granaries at double the speed.

There are Horses to the north, so I’ll be skipping Archery for a while and use Warriors for defense until I can get a second city to grab horses for Chariots.


I now understand why Ruff_Hi listed the map script as “not telling”. I knew that meant he was up to no good again. This strange world defies the laws of Physics: it is a very thin strip of land that seems to extend very far. One thing that will do is increase maintenance costs quite a bit. Fortunately, we are Organized (-50% Civic Upkeep) which might help a little. We shall see.

The screenshot below reveals Ruff_Hi’s cruel idea of our home-world. The red dot would be my next city (Edirne) and the yellow dot would come after that (Ankara).


I took the following screenshot at the end of the game to give everyone an idea of how messed up our Ice World was:


In other news, both Buddhism and Hinduism fall very early, 3680 BC and 3400 BC respectively.

After researching Animal Husbandry, I start on Mining with the goal of getting to Bronze Working for Slavery as soon as possible. Especially with cheap Granaries, Slavery would be useful even earlier than usual.

Meanwhile, my Warrior had wandered east after making contact very early with Genghis Khan to the west. There he popped a Scout which ventured further east while the Warrior returned home, wounded from a vicious Lion attack. Then, in a crazy streak of luck I have never had quite like this before, the Scout pops Writing (171 beakers) and Horseback Riding (357 beakers) within a couple turns of one another. And just like that, in 3240 BC (a mere 19 turns into the game), we enter the Classical Age!

The new plan is pretty much the same as the old plan: get a second city next to the Horses. However, I’ll now be researching Archery to get some Horse Archers to go on an offensive killing spree. Let’s just hope Genghis doesn’t build too many Spears.


Classical Age
I meet Hannibal from the western side, so he must be just west of Genghis. My Scout also managed to meet Brennus far to the east before succumbing to animal savagery. There is a ton of space to the east between us and the Celts.

After Bronze Working, it was a tough call between Iron Working and Mathematics. I didn’t want to chop anything until I had Mathematics since we have few Forests to work with. On the flip side, Bronze Working revealed no Copper nearby so we are currently metal-less. With Horses nearby and Horseback Riding already, this is not a big problem, except that the Pig tile east of the Horse tile is currently Jungle-fied, so we will need Iron Working to clear it out.

Research went as follows after Iron Working: Fishing, Mathematics, Masonry, Hunting, and Archery. After that I decided to head for Currency, a tech I felt that I would need since I was planning on going to war with Genghis very soon. He had Spears of course, but I was planning on bringing plenty of troops.

Before preparing the war machine, I had added another two cities. One to the east to pick up the Gem mines (and within range of the Crab with a border pop), and one to the west that would grab the Iron and Fish (which would also require a border pop). That Iron city was not planned too well. It would be a fine city in the long run, but in the short run it was useless until the border popped, and that would take a long time.

In 475 BC, the first Mongol city of Ning-hsia falls to the mighty Ottoman empire! Beshbalik falls next in 350 BC after the horsies have a chance to heal up.

I had to make peace with Genghis before the task was complete since his capitol was on a Hill. I’ll probably have to come back with Catapults to get the job done. I did score Mysticism and 40g in exchange for peace.

It takes many hundred years, but the Mongols are finally wiped out in 580 AD.

I completed the Swordsman quest, mostly to see what the rewards were. I was giving a choice of a free promotion to City Raider 1, or a free promotion to Drill 1 (if you are using Hereditary Rule). The bonus should really have been Drill 1 in addition to CR1. Oh well.


The Forbidden Temple was built in the original Mongol capital of Karakorum to try and keep maintenance costs reasonable.

I built the Colossus at some point. I wanted to make sure I grabbed it early since it would be a financial powerhouse in this game where every city would be coastal. Later in the game I would also defer researching Astronomy for as long as possible in order to maximize the ridiculous financial advantage of this Wonder.

I pushed further west and Hannibal’s civilization was extinguished on 1230 AD. It was now time to really start thinking about the end-game and how to maximize scoring…


Planning for the Long Campaign Ahead
To be honest, I hadn’t done any long term planning at the start of the game. The one thing that was clear however was that I wanted to maximize the number of Victory Conditions achieved regardless of how long that would take.

After Hannibal’s demise, I took some time to really think about what was going to be possible. Having founded only a single religion (Confucianism), I had thought that a Cultural Victory would not be possible. But that’s because I normally try to achieve a Cultural Victory by 1700 AD, but in this game, we would get at least 200 extra turns. This would of course make a Cultural Victory possible, although it would require a little planning.

Here are the possible Victory Conditions: Time, Conquest, Domination, UN Diplomatic, AP Diplomatic, Space, and Culture.

It is not possible to get all three of the following: Time, UN Diplomatic, and AP Diplomatic. The reason being that the AP expires when the UN is built, and the first UN vote is not until 6 turns after it has been built.

So my goal was to achieve all the Victory conditions except for AP. I was not planning on building the UN until the game was about to end so as to reduce the chance of my miscalculating when exactly the UN vote would come up (because every once in a while you vote for a new UN Security General rather than a resolution).

A game on “Normal” speed lasts 500 turns. Here is the breakdown:

Only one teeny tiny bug

The addressee must have logged on at least once before you can send to them.


I have successfully off-loaded some stuff from ForWarper to EsmeWeatherwax. But I was unable to deluge anyone else with junk - yet.

Well, I really messed this one up. Despite playing a test game, I still misjudged when the stupid spaceship would land and only one a space race victory. Which stinks, because I was going to get everything else but religious on the next turn :mad:. The map was interesting, I haven't read sponsor's comments yet but I'm guessing the intent was to slow the player down and add a bit of suspense. It worked for me...the last AW epic on the ring showed I have the mental ability to work on one front at a time only, and this was no different. I hemmed in Genghis and then got a bunch of Settlers in place for the last turn. I was on full Farm/Artist mode and had enough not only to bomb the cultural victory, but to bomb five other cities to claim more land. I seem to have deleted my screenshots, but my score on the penultimate turn when I won (:mad: :mad: :mad: ) was somewhere between 4000 and 5000. Sorry I can't be more precise, but I doubt I won anyway, since I landed one turn too early (:mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: ). I guess just pencil me in for 4000, it was at least that. Thanks Ruff for an interesting challenge that I wasn't up to (:mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: ).

Darrell

When does the next Epic / Adv start? I have no interest in Epic 18.