I'll save my words, just check this starting spot out:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment...1181187979

Check... this... out.

Dwarf Fortress

This is one of the best games I've ever seen. It's still in alpha, but it's free and phenomenal. Example: the games like 4/5 mb's to download (it's got ASCII graphics, so don't expect a picture show), and the first thing you gotta do is create a world. This can take anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour (on a low-end machine). It's... quite complex.

Why's it take so long? Well, first the game generates the world, runs rivers, lakes and then subjects it to a millennium weathering. It populates it with civilizations, legendary creatures, etc... and then it's your turn.

The game has two modes: Adventurer and Dwarf Fortress. I haven't played Adventurer yet, but I've heard it's a pretty straightforward rogue-like; this area isn't quite as developed. Fortress mode is where the meat is at:

You start, alone, at a mountainside, with seven dwarves and whatever supplies you chose to bring along from the mountain homes. From there, it's all up to you: you dig into the mountain and set up a fortress, and can do almost anything. Make alcohol and tons of wealth? Check. Fend off massive goblin sieges and even more mythical creatures (yeah... think dragons)? Check.

The site's above, if anyone's interested. It's an indie-game, and with the things that the dev has planned, it looks to be even more promising than it is now.

Oh, and here's the wiki. Trust me, you'll need it.

http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/index.php/Main_Page

Our game has run into some unforeseen issues and we've lost a couple of players. So we're looking for some replacements. One would be great. Two would be greater still.

Here's the link if you'd like to read up on it first. It'd probably be best if you weren't familiar w/ the spoilers in the other RB29 games. I hope that doesn't eliminate too many people.

i'm playing epic 11 right now. no spoilers but i'm having fun . i don't think i'll be scoring, since i believe i will die, but i'm taking screenshots at the key dates just in case.

last night i crashed while manually saving before i went to bed. Memory Allocation Error, i don't often get them but the RNG hands me one sometimes if i play a lot of hours, and i have been. i knew from reading the rules page that reloading from the most recent autosave is permitted under certain circumstances. go read that page if you haven't!!! the rules don't specifically cover a game crash but i figured it falls under "What constitutes "significant" harm is at your own discretion, but please use common sense. ... We trust you not to reload to get do-overs." i wasn't breaking the sense of that rule by aiming for any sort of do-over. but the purpose of saving in the first place was to go to bed, so i planned to start from the autosave in the morning and did not do it then. i wasn't at war at the time so i knew recreating that turn wouldn't be hard. not much had happened and i was so tired!

i have autosaves set to every turn, and to save the most recent 30. just in case, i copied the latest autosave before i went to bed. then this morning, i loaded the most recent found of my SG to check it out. i'd forgotten that no matter how many autosaves you save, the folder completely resets when you change between games!

lots of us play SGs. so this is a reminder if anybody is forgetful like me. if for whatever reason you're in a legitimate position to reload from the autosave, but decide to not do it right away, copy that autosave because if you load another game in the meantime, the autosave you need will disappear! i'm glad i am a "just in case' type!

ps i am reading that rule in the spirit rather than the literal wording, which says "No restarts, and no reloads, except if you suffer one of the following misfortunes". my misfortune was not in fact "one of the following". is there an official rule that game crashes count you out for scoring? i know that there could be, since it makes a game looks suspicious (it does for CFC HoF). it's okay if there is, as i said i don't think i'll win the game, and even if i do i want to respect the rules more than i want to get a silly number as a score.

Hi

I had high hopes for the past weekend. I had finally persuaded my husband that the expensive process of putting the siding I wanted on our cottage did not have to be done in one fell swoop. We could do it one outside wall at a time.

The cottage was built in the '40's and sided with asbestos shingles, which are a shade of green that makes me think of hospital worker garb. The longer I looked at it, the more I grew to hate it. About 10 years ago, we painted it a cheerful and bright white. Now, the paint is flaking all over the place and makes the poor cottage look even more decrepit than it really is. Scraping the paint to clean it enough to re-paint is not a healthy option. Removing the asbestos shingles is not an option - for both health and cost reasons (disposal fees for asbestos are quite rightly expensive). So I want to cover the whole unsightly thing with cedar board and batten siding. First wall would be the one that faces the road and is now quite visible from the road due to losing all those trees in a storm in Feb. '06.

We reckoned this weekend was the opportune moment. We ordered the wood from a local sawmill guy. We bought a nail gun and a big box of nails. We recruited my eldest son to come to aid the project. Second eldest works on weekends, so he was unable to join in. Eldest asked if he could recruit a couple of friends for the project. It all looked eminantly do-able to have one end of the cottage covered in a weekend. Amateurs we are, but we have pulled off many a project this way in the past.

We arrived about 8:00 p.m. on Friday. I headed over to the sawmill to collect the wood. It wasn't all quite ready for me, but the sawmill guy got a few machines going and he and I finished off the last boards and loaded them in the min-van. He then asked if they were going to be vertical or horizontal. I said vertical and he asked if I knew how to join them to avoid rot. I denied any such knowledge, so he set up one more saw and showed me how to make the cuts on an angle to let the overlaps join correctly.

I finally arrived back at the cottage and imparted this knowledge to my husband, who looked me in the eye and denied that he possessed a saw that could do this. We offloaded the lumber and I went to bed, hoping to arise early enough to go find one the next morning, borrow it and be back before the workers arose.

Now, a prudent worker for a Work Weekend™ would have had a couple of beers and gone to bed early too, no? I am not surrounded by prudent people. Apparently the workers carried on until at least 4:00 a.m.

I arose at 6:00 a.m., did the prep work for a massive breakfast for the workers and then sallied forth to locate a saw that would do the angled cuts we needed. By 8:30 a.m. I had the saw (borrowed from an equally early-rising neighbour) back and set up. I rousted the troops and got them fed and going.

Now, one of my son's friends understood the concept clearly. He was tired but was cheerful. The other had failed to grasp the concept of Work Weekend™ altogether. He wandered about in a surly and grumpy fashion, took unannounced breaks and wandered by now and then to suggest that we should all go for a swim or something because he was bored.

However, work proceeded apace and we got all the set-up for actually nailing the cedar onto the wall done by early evening. (Strapping nailed to the walls, fixtures attached to the wall removed, and tar paper covering the entire wall) Another neighbour came by to watch the work (this always happens when there is a project - although ours may be cause for more amusement than others, we are all nosy about what is going on in the vicinity). He asked to see the new toy nail gun and then asked if we knew that galvanized nails were what was needed for the project, because he knew from bitter experience of his own that the regular sort would rust. A quick check of the box of nails revealed that it was not, in fact, the right sort of nails. By this time, the local hardware stores were all closed. Ok, I knew what I was doing early the next morning.

Did the prudent workers decide to rest in preparation for the work of the next day? A crokinole tournament was organized and there was considerable merriment. I took myself to bed at midnight, but the others carried on.

I got up first, made a quick phone call to two of the three possible sources of more nails, in order of distance to drive. The first didn't open until 10:00 a.m. - scratch that. The second opened at 9:00 a.m., so I phoned then and acertained that they did, in fact, have that size of nail in galvanized form. I drove the 20 miles to the store, asked for the box of nails and almost bought the wrong kind anyway because the store clerk brought me the wrong ones, caught myself, and drove back triumphantly with the right ones. By the time I got the crew going, it was 10:30 a.m.

The crew was tired. The crew boss, my husband, was particularly tired and grumpy. I could digress for some time on a rant about how men of a certain age should just acknowledge that they no longer possess the vigour of youth and not try to out-stay-up-late men in their early 20's, but suffice it to say that he is stubborn about such things.

The work proceeded very slowly, as any error on the wood cuts (or the measuring that preceeded each cut) was visible only after the board was nailed on, which meant tearing it off and cutting again. Grimly watching expensive boards be mangled is not a cheering sort of thing either. More could be procured, but not on a Sunday.

It was hot. It was humid. There was a thunderstorm in the forecast and we were having that calm before the storm. There were blackflies. There were mosquitos. The flesh was weak and the spirit was increasingly less willing as the day dragged on.

What saved us was the storm. It had not arrived at the cottage yet, but it did strike somewhere on the Bruce Peninsula with sufficient force to knock out the power. No power = no power tools. We all sighed internally with relief. Now, if we gave up, it wasn't because we were weak and foolish. It was because we had to stop. This sort of psychological spin is important.

We cleaned up the work area, battened down for the incoming storm, locked up and then had the joy of being followed home by the storm and passing in and out of a few of them on the way home.

The siding is on a full one third of one wall of the cottage. And that was the easy one third, before we had to start notching out for the door, window, vent and electric meter.

What odds we do better next weekend?

Since no one else has jumped in to do this, I'll post my thoughts on the postgame recap...

Not a good outing. Using the build in the "Next GvG build" thread, we went 0-3. In all matches we were the lower-rated team, so all were fought on our own Isle of Solitude.

As the Divert Hexes monk, I stayed with the main team, so I can't offer any insight into how the gank team did in the early phases of the matches. In the first match, we all went out the teleporter (except for the flagger, who ran out the front door), with the 2 assassins then going to the enemy back door and the main team heading toward the flag stand. At the flag stand, we couldn't stand up to the opposing force, and the assassins joined us for some extra damage output. Still, we couldn't stand up to them, and fell back into our base. That ended up being the pattern that was repeated in the other two matches, though with variations as to how we started out. One time the entire team rushed to the enemy back door and took out a few NPCs to start. The third match the main team went out the front door.

In all cases, we suffered from the main team not having enough staying power against the opponents to allow the gank team to go, well...gank! They kept having to come back to help out, and that made it possible for the opponents to all come hammer at us. Not good. So the main team needs more strength - probably another warrior or paragon to provide less squishiness. The second problem we had was that we tended to completely freak out when the enemy managed to get into our base - the assassins came rushing back to help defend, and their went our ability to make them split. This might seem just another facet of the first problem, but it's more mental - we have to get more comfortable and confident, and that will just take some more (and more, and more) practice.

A few more specific observations:
1. We learned that having the only hard res on the team on the mesmer was a Bad Idea. Putting an additional hard res on one of the E/Mos helped a bit.
2. One of the toughest things for me as a monk was trying to support the NPCs. Perhaps I just haven't yet developed enough battlefield awareness yet, but since I'm usually watching the party's health bars, I'm not too clued in to what's happening to our archers and footmen. Wyrm would call out, "Watch that archer!" and by the time I'd figure out which archer "that" archer was, he'd be down to a sliver of life, and would be dead before I'd get a heal off. It would really help if we could come up with a system of designating the NPCs by location - maybe we don't want to go as far as "Watch Archer #6!", but "Watch northwest wall archer!" or "Watch back door archer!" would be helpful, since the monks aren't necessarily always looking the the same place as other members of the team.
3. I know it didn't help matters that the teams opposing us were rated higher, in one case considerably higher than we were. So we shouldn't get too discouraged.

That's all I can think of for now. I think that this build has potential - I like the 2 assassin gank squad, if the main team could just make it so they could go off and gank! But we do need to do some tweaking...

I don't know how many of you still read the Diablo forums, so I thought I'd post this here. We're trying to organize a team based on a Druid variant created by Sirian (and never implemented). Details over in the Diablo forum, or at this location:

http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?t=2133

Thanks!

I am still quite the newcomer to RealmBeyond, so bear with me if this was discussed or proposed before.
I think that the pace of one Epic/one Adventure per month is really good but for the ones more interested in MP, why don´t we have MP Epics?

Those could range from 2-4 RB players in a challenge against the AI, even to 2vs2 or 4 player in a free for all situation with reports all round and 3-4 sessions with 2-3 hours played over one month resulting in one Multiepic each month. 2-4 Rb players against the AI would play like Succession Games played together and 1vs1 or 2vs2 would result in nicely moderated and edited map for a heads-up.

I would volunteer for moderation as Sulla has his hands probably full with the Epics and Adventures, though whoever is willing can have that position.
Now my question is the following, what does everyone think, is this a good idea, would you participate?

Since I'm working on my treasure hunter and wisdom titles in a casual sort of way, this coming weekend seems designed for me. Double gold drops from chests? Yes, please.

So, I have about 60k to burn on keys that would have been burned on keys sometime in the future anyway, and my question is, what is the most efficient way to burn that cash given that I want to max both my treasure hunter and wisdom titles?

Also, where's a good place to "run" chests?

Northern Shiverpeaks, Witman's Folly, usually nets me an average of 2 chests per 5 minute run, but the gold drop rate isn't great in normal mode...in the region of 1 in 5 chests are gold (in my limited experience of perhaps 15 runs ). I haven't tried the run in HM yet...

I have rank 1 in both titles, so something under 20% chance of retaining a lockpick...

So...Prophecies hard mode or normal mode, and any good areas to run? (No HM in Factions or NF yet, sadly, and if I try and finish either this weekend, that's no time left to run chests...)

We don't have a game opening or closing this week, so it's a good time to get some community feedback. I'd like to run this thread to hear some opinions on what you'd like to see in terms of future Epics/Adventures. Here's what the tenative upcoming schedule looks like:

Warlords Three (Medium difficulty, points scoring system: diplomacy)
Epic Eleven (Medium difficulty, points scoring system: culture)
Adventure Twenty (Gentle Adventure, fastest finish: domination)
Epic Twelve (Extreme Adventure, no scoring, restrictive variant)
Adventure Twenty-One (Medium difficulty, "crazy" variant a la Adventure Nineteen)

That's designed to take us up to the end of July, where we can re-evaluate things based on the release of the next expansion. For now, I'd like to get some of your responses to these questions:

1) How do you feel about the difficulty of the games we've been running? Would you like to see more Gentle/Medium/Extreme games?

2) Should we run more Warlords games? (I've been sticking mostly with Civ4 1.61 because the turnout was VERY low for the first two Warlords games, so please let me know if you want more games on the expansion!)

3) What kind of games would you like to see? Let me give you some general types:
a) Fastest-finish competitions (ex: Adventure Four)
b) Points scoring (ex: Warlords Three, Epic Eleven)
c) Restrictive variant (ex: Always War, Honorable ruleset, etc.)
d) "crazy" rule-breaking game (ex: Adventure Nineteen)
e) no scoring

4) What game speeds should we use? More Epic speed, less Epic speed? Should we experiment with Quick or Marathon speeds? (There was a very low turnout for Quick speed in Adventure Seven, and Marathon is pretty broken, but we CAN run games if there is desire for them.)

5) Are the games too long? Too short? There have been a lot of incomplete games turned in recently - should we try to implement scenarios that are easier to finish quickly?

6) Anything else I haven't covered yet: what would you like to see that we're not providing right now?

Looking forward to what you come up with. Thanks!