I surcommed to temptation and bought WoW.

Are there any RBers still playing this game?

Being from Aus I am on Oceanic servers - Barthilas and Thaurissan (yes, pvp servers - friends of mine conned me into it). I currently have a dwarf warrior on Barthilas (Braagh) and an undead mage on thaurissan (Mishdorf) if anyone is interested in questing.

On a side note - how are you all? It's been a while.

Axe: 16 (+4); Strength: 9 (+1); Tactics: 11 (+1)
Rush, Frenzy, Eviscerate, Executioner's Strike, Bull's Strike, Shock, Heal Sig, Res Sig

Crit: 13 (+1); Dagger: 13 (+2); Deadly: 7 (+1)
Shadow Prison, Black Lotus Strike, Twisting Fangs, Black Spider Strike, Horns of the Ox, Tiger Stance, Recall, Res Sig

Crit: 13 (+1); Dagger: 13 (+2); Deadly: 7 (+1)
Shadow Prison, Black Lotus Strike, Twisting Fangs, Black Spider Strike, Horns of the Ox, Tiger Stance, Recall, Res Sig

Dom: 14 (+2); FC: 10 (+1); Insp: 10 (+1)
Mantra of Recovery, Diversion, Shame, Power Leak, Power Drain, Shatter Enchant, Mirror of Disenchantment, Res Chant

Air: 14 (+2); Earth: 9 (+1); E Storage: 11 (+1); Prot: 2
Blinding Surge, Gale, Lightning Orb, Air Attunement, Glyph of Lesser Energy, Ward Against Foes, Draw Conditions, Res Sig

Water: 14 (+2); E Storage: 10 (+1); Prot: 9
Freezing Gust, Ice Spikes, Armor of Mist, Shield of Regeneration, Mending Touch, Aegis, Glyph of Lesser Energy, Res Sig

Prot: 14 (+2); DF (+1): 11; Heal: 8
Reversal of Fortune, Gift of Health, Shield of Absorption, Divert Hexes, Dismiss Condition, Spirit Bond, Glyph of Lesser Energy, Aegis

Heal: 14 (+2); Prot: 8; DF: 11 (+1); Shadow: 2
Dwayna's Kiss, Protective Spirit, Reversal of Fortune, Light of Deliverence, Infuse Health, Dismiss Condition, Holy Veil, Return

Edit: build copied from Virtual Dragons [vD]. Added attributes.

This might be a longshot, but...

I'm a new RB member, although I've lurked for quite awhile for Civ4 purposes, and shadowed some of the tougher games (I'll get around to reporting some games once grad school stuff is finished).

Due to idly reading news about Starcraft 2 (not that I'm an RTS guy), I found myself wistfully recalling my Diablo 2 days. I played a TON of C2D back in the day, and had another long run once LOD came out. But after college I lost my core group of teammates, and soloing was just no fun. I need the interaction, the sharing of items, the planning, all that jazz.

I quickly realized that this is probably my last chance to get in some mad-cap Diablo2 action...the desire to see pretty blue, green, and gold items fall is gnawing at my soul. :mad:

So I'm looking for a few like-minded folks who want to join a committed group capable of meeting at a regular time a week or something. If there are any RB folks who actively play I'd join in, but my absolute ideal is to get a group of folks to start a group of new characters, no twinking or any of that crap, and just do it right. It could be a variant, it could be an all Pally-team (never got a chance to do that, and I'd love to, as I'm a big Paladin fan), it could just be straight up playing...whatever! I'm holding out hope that some other folks here might be interested as well, since I don't know anywhere else where quality, articulate, friendly folks of this caliber hang out. I've done this before....in City of Heroes, I put together a "superteam" of 8 people who played each week, with powers and themes customized especially to play with each other, and that lasted for a year.

So, sorry for the long rant. I was just looking through random D2 stuff today, and saw a picture of the council, and my hands started twitching.....

When I created the starting save for RBW4 It's a scary world out there I forgot to enable PA's and vassal systems. I was curious if anyone could edit the save and enable these two options. Thanks!

Here's the RBW4 4000 BC Save.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/adv19results.html

A few words about the formatting... it looks a bit strange here on my website, but that's because I've designed the tables to fit the much smaller frames that are used on the RB website. Those tables *SHOULD* compress nicely and look very good once Gris gets them up on the main page. At least in theory. They don't look all that bad right now either, methinks.

As far as the game itself, I mailed out 45 start files and we ended up with 23 reports. That's pretty good; we always have far more players trying their hands at these games than reports submitted. A number of faces delurked for this game, which was great to see. Since there was no scoring for this game, I organized the results by victory type and in order of finishing date.

Spaceship was the most popular victory type; there were as many Spaceship wins as all other victories combined. No one actually pursued a Cultural victory, surprisingly enough! (Saving that for Epic Eleven?) In a slightly less-encouraging trend, we had more incomplete games (13) than completed ones (10), mostly due to lack of enough time to finish. I'll try to keep that in mind when designing future games, although Civ by its very nature drags a lot in the endgame...

And just to explain fully, Darrell and I obviously get roped into shadow-game territory, while Jabah and Chaos Theory have to be placed there as well because their reports were submitted late. Sorry about that, but I've made sure to include your games in the results with everyone else.

Congratulations to all participants, and especially to Darrell for sponsoring this event.

Hey guys,

This weekend is a GvG double faction rewards weekend - are we going to get our act together to take advantage of it?

Our GvG efforts have really taken a nosedive lately.

This concerns both the "Nudist Journal" and "Voices in the Wilderness," so it's getting meshed into one big topic. As most of you know, I've stated in the past that I would update these, and I've also fallen behind due to various reasons, one of which is writer's block. There are other reasons, but that's the important one and I just wanted to let you guys in on the thought process behind why it's so hard for me to get those things updated. Oh, and no, I'm not fishing for compliments.

Basically, I'm not exactly sure how to keep the stories going without straying from the spirit of the variant. The stories have basically gone as follows: they follow the mission/quest progression. I've thrown a few tidbits or wisecracks in to sort of tie in with what the team did those meeting times (yell if you recognize where I got this one from: "This is wrong! You all shall face the Divine Punishment that awaits you in the Underworld!" said Arty.) but, for the most part, during the write-up there's very little to differentiate our story of these variants from that of any other group going through the game.

Secondly, I have a hard time working without a main character and I don't want to pick one because there really is none within the variant. I can work around this one to a certain extent, but what I wind up doing is having little to no character development because instead of having a dialogue between 2 people to explain something I wind up with a group discussion that's largely generic.

Third, and yes these are getting weaker as the list goes on, I don't really like making up lines and actions for other people. Some things I don't mind streching a bit if it's still in the spirit of what happened (i.e. the earlier mentioned quote by Arty) but since my memory of most of what happened is hazy (even when I did the write-up that same evening or early the next day it would still be a bit fuzzy) I would have to create a lot of "false" occurences that just don't sit right with me.

Anyways, the first one is the important one, the second I can sorta work around, the third, well, I wanted to put something else in the list and that was all I could think of. So my question to you guys is: what do I (we) do about that first one?

Fox ranked #6 on the hero battles today...shows the real skill that we have in this guild...congrats Fox :2dance:

I know I am late, I did finish ontime (earlier last week), but being away + having a RL with very few time for myself (welcome to living in fatherhood-land), I didn't really plan to report this game properly.

Now looking at all players report, I am 'shocked' to notice than no one took that choice (rifling), so maybe I might had a few comments and pictures laters.

My decision was that I wanted to play a fast and relaxing (like don't have to think too much to win ) game in the few time I have for myself, so I wanted to be able to build a invincible unit from the beginning. (The idea was a few solid cities buiding them, the others in charge of the token defences, infra and settlers/workers)

Therefore I consider the option of Rifling (Riflemen), Artillery (Artillery) and rocketery (SAM Inf) and decide than Rifle were the best compromise with the expected units the AIs might get (as artillery get no defence and Sam where a bit to expensive for not enough extra imho).

From the very beginning I did immediatly regret that choice as the only 'real' military unit I was able to build was rifle (That is no warrior, archer, axe, sword... as they all upgrade to rifle!!!). The only cheap units available were scout (useless as military, good for scouting therefore used a lot), chariot (no horse around...), and much later cats, elephant and for some unknowed reason (because they did upgrade to Rifle as well) Cho-do-ku (were my home defence) and mace.

Since I didn't want to defend only with my initial warrior, and couldn't send naked settlers (thks to barbarians), I had to build some Rifles before expending and therefore had to delay for a very long time my expansion.

I won a conquest around 1800's taking age to capture all the small island in the south with galley... (no one get to astro to get to the 'other' land)

The military campaigns were not that exiting, losing a total of probably 1 rifles all game, around 5 in the mid game to 95% odds and 5 late game to 70% odds (rushing to finish a city, attacking without cats supports or most often having to do amphibious assault on longbows defending cities on hills)

Jabah

Sorry I didn't get anything posted sooner, but I slept through most of the weekend. So, here's the short version with a long version coming at some point:

Very short version: Victory by space race in 1959

Short version: Mao's Great Leap Forward! Mao is enlightened to be skilled at leveraging peasants' labor. No simply tilling fields or trading rocks to each other in a hole in the ground (cottage). Nay, they will harvest the fruits of the land with watermills, wherever possible, and windmills/workshops in most tiles. Special resources still got their special improvements. No cottages at all and no farms except on grain resources.

To actually make a run at this, I badly need some river tile frontage, or my sources of income are terribly stunted. Though no rivers were available in the starting area, one big, long, excellent one ran north/south to the west of me, more than enough.

The ideal plan was this:
Find stone.
Build the Pyramids and go Representation
Use the resulting GE to lightbulb Machinery.
Put up watermills/windmills/workshops everywhere, completely eschewing cottages.
If iron is around, consider some warmongering with CKNs.
If the pyramids are missed, cottages might be used to limp to Machinery.
If rivers are exceptionally scarce, I'll turn this into a shadow game with Replaceable Parts instead.
If marble is available, might go after the Oracle.

As it turns out, I had no source of stone, but did have some marble, so I Oracle Leapfrogged and came out with machinery fairly early, but my iron source was in the far north, so I couldn't make CKNs until I found it, just as they were becoming marginally obsolete.

Stuff happened which will be filled in, but my manufacturing powered my economy, which drove my research, which let me deal with pesky other AIs and bloat my empire.

Victory by space race in 1959