An extreme adventure! What's not to love? I had to give this a shot.

I settled in place almost without thinking about it. Only afterward did I realize that there were no resources. (Floodplains are almost resources, so it didn't jump out at me immediately. However, I did quickly guess what the surprise was:



Wow. Immortal with no buddies and no resources. This is going to be painful. I think I played about 15 turns during my first session, exploring the east side of the island and popping a hut which revealed some coast that was certainly not within cultural range. After that, it was about 2 weeks before I picked up the game again.

I decided that there were two broad choices for what Sullla could have done: either he similarly handicapped the other AIs by isolating all civs and taking away all resources on the map, or he only did this for the human player. Obviously the latter is by far the more brutal variant.

Assuming the worst, I figured the only two chances I had to win were either by culture (slim chance) or by diplomacy (no chance). So, I decided to pursue the cultural victory.

For this, I figured I'd better get a religion reasonably early, which meant an all-out gamble for:



I ran a ridiculously bare-bones warrior defense. I snuck a settler out to grab a city site in the east. I prioritized Pottery and worked cottages. While I was building the Oracle, I was pillaged back to the stone age (oh wait, I never left the stone age) by a barb archer near the capital. But, I did get the Oracle and founded Confucianism. Thus, I had my religion. My free missionary actually spent many turns busting fog for me.

Stage Two was to fogbust the entire island. I think I lost a warrior or two, but I managed to get the entire island fogbusted before any barb cities could pop up. Any kind of serious military was not in my plans at all, so I thought this was important.

Happiness was addressed by Monarchy with warrior builds.

That was it for the early game. The rest was straightforward: settle the island at a rate I could afford. Build warriors for Hereditary Rule Happiness. Site cities where I could take advantage of food, aqueducts and rivers to maximize final population size.

I don't seem to have taken an empire-overview shot, but here's where I put my 2nd and 3rd cities:

Second:


and third:


I played hard, and I thought I did reasonably well, but I didn't set up GP farms until too late, so I popped 2 prophets before a few artists came along.

Also, I hardly worked any farms, preferring cottages. I turned off research and went all culture as soon as I got Liberalism, but it just wasn't enough.

To cut a long story short, despite our lack of knowledge of Astronomy, our people still saw this in 1882:



Pacal launched his fully equipped spaceship. In 1900AD, he arrived at Alpha Centauri. My cultural efforts were pathetic:



Even though Pacal won by space, his high culture cities were double what mine were.

So, I don't know if this was a strategic error (some other route enabled victory), or a tactical error (if I could have done better to pull out a culture victory), or simply an unwinnable setup.

I know I gave it my best shot and came up short. I did have a lot of fun, especially in the beginning, trying to figure out how to land the Oracle, fogbust the island, and then plot the cities for maximum long-term cottages. Keep the extreme adventures coming, Sullla!

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

If someone was to, say, run an adventure were a win result wasn't much of an issue - important but not really a contest - what level should the game be run at?

1) Noble
2) Prince
3) Monarch
4) Emperor
5) Other - please specify

Already bagged the heads of 3 different Caste Overlords from hell, last night Chobit (Nougan's Engineer) and Bede went to Wake Hollow in search of the Shadow Pass cave to defeat the last Caste Overlord The Nicor. With some luck, we found Shadow Pass in a jiffy. We were then joined by SybilRamkin (Shadow) and CullenBaker. With Shadow's Witch Dr. keeping every one healthy, and the awesome firepower of 1 Evoker, 1 Summoner, and 2 Engineers, we blew past the demons and took down The Nicor without much problem.

Then with all 4 Caste Overlord's heads, we embarked on our journey to defeat the fearsome Pit Baron, Moloch. We first entered Moloch's Step, which is similar to Wake Hollow. The new type of demon the Winged Imp Sniper made a grand entrance... but were shredded to pieces within seconds by us.

From Moloch's Step, we entered Necro Fall. It resembles Necropolis but has many levels. The main feature of this map is a big shaft in the center with a bridge on each level which connects two ends of the shaft (it reminds me of Starwars...). Chobit learned the hard way that one CAN fall off the bridge... even though there is no fall damage in HGL, whether you land on another bridge at a lower level, or all the way to the bottom, you are likely welcomed by a group of demons (especially at the bottom), waiting for you with all kinds of weapons/claws/teeth/fire breathes... After falling a few more times (accidentally and intentionally), we made it to Moloch's throne room Master's Court.

One word to describe Master's Court - KEWL! 8) A few Imp Diabolists started to fire at us, and then the Pit Baron himself charged in our direction. We quickly fired everything we got at that huge demon lord. It took us a little while, but we finally defeated him! Woohoo! We did it!

Below are some screenshots taken during the fight and after Moloch laid dead behind us.
:2dance:


Many thanks to Bede, CullenBaker and SybilRamkin for making this journey to Moloch a fun and exciting one. We should definitely do this again. I read somewhere that the 1st person who entered Moloch's throne room sets the level. So next time we should let the highest level person in the group enter the throne room first if we want more challenge.

Hi

I was dithering over where to place a new skill point and noticed this:



Sybill has two skill points in Elemental Drain, and holds a focus with +3 Elemental Drain, so it should, I thought, not show me anything higher as a possibility.

Seems too good to be true, that we can actually get past base maximums on skills, and will certainly change how I go about building characters, if so.

King of Pain's Black Licorice, Nougan's Chobit, and Bede made a foray into The WIld last night and made it all the way into Deepest Wild before being defeated by the scope of the monsters and the map. The session ended with three ghosts standing in a circle wondering where in hell the gravestones were.

Lots of varied terrain and a good mix of monsters. Lots of flying dragons in the low lying lands and some very vicious ground pounders in the uplands.

I think it is a good place for exploring in a group and collecting XP. Bede entered The Wild having just reached level 33 and by the end of the session had grown to level 34.5. The demons get stronger the farther and deeper you go.

Much fun was had.

In the (very unlikely) event that we somehow pull off both desert missions in the next session (yeah right! ) I thought we should begin discussing post-Ascension revision of the nudist rules.

You might want to look here for reference when I came up with these ideas.

The short version therin:

-allow any character from any campaign
-any skills elite or non
-Candy Cane weapons/shield and their equivalents
-not resolved on PvE skills or consumeables

Now at least Zed was grumbling a bit about these, so I want to provide my reasoning for coming up with these rules at the time; they might be less applicable now and we can try something different.

The situation was one where we couldn't always have our full team together. Working with only one monk for instance is absolutely crippling, and henchies just can't replace suitably thanks to their heathen clothes-wearing ways. (Alesia is probably a better monk than anyone with 2 pips...) We needed not only fresh bodies to replace nudists that had fallen by, but also to join up once the team count hit 8, and we needed guests to fill in if someone couldn't make it some night.

At the time I wasn't sure we could pull this off from just within our guild; hence I wanted to make a very simplified, bare-bones version of the rules that you could teach someone in a few bullet points. Limited character slots also make dedicated variant characters a hard bite for newcomers to swallow, hence these were opened up so that any character could participate if they play by the rules. I think most of these developments were a good thing, but the above isn't necessarily the only way KISS rules have to be done.

One thing that has kept nudist progress so slow is the various skill quests we kept doing to expand our skills. While those are about dried up after ascension, it is replaced by the much more arduous task of skill capping and accessing out-of-the-way shiverpeak outposts. I wanted our sessions to just focus on the main mission path, and leave it to members to coordinate skill aquisition on their own time. That combined with bringing in non-nudist characters who have no idea where they aquired skills, and avoid bogging down artificial determinations like "could this elite have been capped yet?" made me want to break the skill acquisition wide open.

With that in mind, at least allowing all core + prophecies skills seems like a good move. Next on the platter is whether to include the "power creep" of factions, nightfall, and their associated classes. The core/proph is another restriction, however minor, that can be an obstacle to guests. You can conveniently sort your skill list by campaign, but then the attributes are a jumbled mess so it's slightly more difficult to deal with. Also I figured some people might want to bring in a nude dervish, ritualist, etc. This opens up many powerful things such as dervish mysticism tanks, skills like Shield of Absorption, and infinite fire ele engine of Mind Blast. All of these will definitely make the nudist going much easier than it has been, although some may find it more fun to have access to so many options.

One "justification" at the time was that the Mursaat are going to be absolute beasts with us only have 1 slot of infused armor. I've even thought over the possibility of allowing some other infused slots (starter-level AL on marginal areas like feet and hands), though the energy bonuses are not consistently distributed to set body parts across the classes, and those are bonuses that need to be avoided. We're already at the point where people without prot can die in two hits, and that will move to one once you hit the enemies above level 20. That said, crafty use of elites and good teamwork can probably see us through on proph + core only, and that would give us more to brag about; I'd also feel better about that route if we have more guildies/regulars involved. We could reserve full skill access for some truly suicidal nudist escapaes like say, EotN.

I don't feel very warm to PvE-only skills, if only because a proper "save yourselves" paragon negates the low-armor half of being nude. This isn't to speak of the insane killing power (if not survivability) of Ursan mode, which if kept up by say bonders or the like, would see us plowing through the missions like nothing.

About candy cane weapons: at times people have been breaking rules and itching to try the darn things. They aren't much use for anything else but the odd scrimmage test. I was also laboring under the mistaken notion that starter items are always customized (only true for prophecies), and we wanted to be able to give newcomers standardized appropriate weapons. It's also questionable whether the entire party being some variant of spellcaster has proved the severe weapon restrictions a wise choice. CC weapons both look good with our holiday hats, speed up the game by killing things a little faster without approaching anything remotely "fast", and give the poor non-spellcasters a bone. That and allowing the +5 energy from the gingerbread focus grants every profession access (in theory) to their 25 e skills, and lets us eliminate the "eyeglasses" rule for res, without anywhere approaching the power of a full energy pool and regen. I'd personally enjoy the addition of CCs (and crafted weapons in about the same damage range), but we can certainly manage without if we have enough purists who would prefer that.

Consumeables; when this was first mildly debated, we only had things such as candy canes wiping DP, but then power creep started with the Birthday Cupcake. Now the EotN consumeables are completely out of control, and stacking them is a good way for otherwise outclassed PvE groups to easymode an area in exchange for gold. The latter feels like far to strong a reliance on "items" for the nudist spirit; rather than sorting the benign from the malign, I'm for a simple ban on the things.

Summary Version of My Opinions (which are up for debate)

- Allow all Core+Prophecies skills. Factions/Nightfall optional.
- Disallow PvE-only skills and consumeables.
- Allow candy cane weapons and equivalents.

Discuss!

http://forums.hellgatelondon.com/showthread.php?t=72776

Quote:In an effort to rapidly fix the gameplay issue where players who have completed Normal difficulty aren't able to create Elite character (nor Hardcore characters for subscribers), we are going to mark all accounts with a character over level 25 as having beaten Normal difficulty. This will help those players who have completed the game on this difficulty but have not received credit for it.

This will be occurring today and tomorrow.

Quote:The word was that it was going to be a two-day process. There wasn't info on it being by server or anything like that.

If tomorrow when the second wave of "level 25" flagging occurs both still show as grayed out, please post here. Thanks.

Quote:Guild Heralds can now be sold back to merchants for full price.

Offline friends are now properly displayed in the Friends List.

Quote: Skill Retrainers now have a confirmation dialogue to help players from accidentally using them.

Quote: To explain the situation with respecs, every eligible character will be getting a new Skill Retrainer, regardless of whether they've already used their first one. However, each character will only be able to have one of these items in their inventory at any given time. If your character already has one, it will not receive another.

• Quote:

• Players may now Recall or Party Portal out of the Hell’s Heart level.
  
• [url=http://forums.hellgatelondon.com/showthread.php?t=70173]Party Portal limitations have been removed from the Stonehenge levels.
  
• Stonehenge now appears as a destination on the Station Transit Terminal.
  
• Stonehenge weapons can now have Mod slots.

I have been assidously collecting Essences for the caves in Wake Hollow and among several characters have more than enough to complete the quest for the Head of Moloch in Normal mode. It will take a while for me to get there in Nightmare but if we want to go that way I will happily bank the Essences until we are ready.

Wake Hollow itself is huge, the Caves are big and twisted and the Lairs are complex. And there are lots of monsters that need killing. Two person parties can do it, three would be better and four or more would be fun.

I propose we pick a day and a time to set off after Moloch. It will take more than one session to complete I should think but five sessions should get it done handily.

As you all have discovered I am good to go most evenings and Saturday afternoons. (Sundays set aside for KoP's ULGG Elite game).

Sooo ... with the holidays over and most of January behind us, are people interested in starting a new MoO succession game? If so, here's the thread to say so and/or post ideas for variants you'd like to try. Here are a few possibilities, in rough order of least to most varied from the standard rules:

1) Vanilla Impossible Mrrshans: No variants except of course that the known exploits would be forbidden. Mrrshans on Impossible are tough enough to play already.

2) Chocolate Impossible (AKA Impossibler) Sakkra: Since we'll be using a stronger race, we'll compensate by artificially enhancing the AI's production bonuses: the tax slider will be set to the maximum throughout the game.

3) The Fate of Trethlyis: The Silicoids were originally designed to serve the furry, nimble-fingered Trethlyin people as self-repairing, self-enhancing silicon-chip computers, but something went terribly wrong. Locked in the vacuum chambers and depressurized space station modules necessary for their operation, as the Silicoids developed sentience, they also grew into a healthy resentment for their "masters." Thus came the Great Rising of 2253, when the Silicoids turned on the Trethlyins and slew them to the last. Ever since, the galaxy's only silicon-based lifeforms have looked to the stars, hoping to find a home where they don't need vacuum chambers to live.
Variant rules: We may neither colonize nor send transports to non-Hostile worlds. Note that we can still develop our homeworld (or any other non-Hostile we somehow acquire) -- we just can't send population there from other planets. Naturally, we can still send scouts and war fleets wherever we want.

4) The Power Behind the Throne: The Darloks have no interest in becoming Emperors of the Galaxy; that would just mean painting a gigantic target on their backs. What they need is a figurehead to prop up while they rule from the shadows -- someone easy for them to manipulate, but fierce enough to enforce their draconian policies while always seeming to the rest of the galaxy to be the one "in charge." Fortunately, the Darloks have singled out an emperor who's perrrrrrrrrrrrfect for the job!
Variant rules: We must not give away our plans to the rest of the galaxy; as such, we must abstain if we are ever the Mrrshans' opponent in a vote, and must always appear small and weak: We may never own more than 5 planets (in a medium galaxy), we may not eliminate any race ourselves, and we may never threaten to attack (we must not appear strong enough for our threats to carry weight).
Victory condition: We must be Allied to the Mrrshans, and they must win a High Council victory.