Hi,

I've just started a new succession game over at CFC, called RB30 - Open SG - Irrational Isabella, and would like to invite you to join me and play this game with me (and hopefully lots of other people)! You can find it here.

-Kylearan

I've been lurking on the GW Guru fora, trying to sort the wheat from the chaff. One thing that I thought was neat was their build layouts - They have the icons laid out like a skillbar, and mousing over them pops up their stats.

I did some searching, and apparently it's just some open-source BBCode so we could install it here and use it ourselves (assuming it's compatible with this forum, I'm not up on that kind of stuff).

Anyway, just throwing the idea out there.

This build has been posted on the forums before. Tho it was in a thread where nobody would search for it. With all the new sub-forums i think it should be here in its own thread.

I am using a build made by Fox Bat as well. I am not sure or he is still using that build but i can write it down here.

Human and 1 hero: SF build
Searing Flames, Glowing Gaze, Liquid Flame, Glyph of lesser energy, Meteor shower, Fire Attunement, Glyph of sacrifice, Ressurection Signet.
Disable MS for the hero since he won't use it in combination with Glyph of Sacrifice and the casting time is too long otherwise.
Attribute Points
Fire magic 12+1+3
Energy storage 12 + 1
Survivor insignias and vitae runes

Hero monk
Spell Breaker, Shield of Absorption, Dwayna's Kiss, Protective Spirit, Healing Touch, Flame Trap, Quickening Zephyr, Frozen Soil.
Disable Frozen Soil. Cast it manually just before the enemies arrive.
Attribute Points
Divine favor 12+1+1
Healing prayers 9+1
Protection prayers 5+1
Wilderniss survival 8
Survivor insignias and vitae runes

Hero trapper
Energizing winds, Serpent's Quickness, Viper's Nest, Dust Trap, Barbed Trap, Spike Trap, Flame Trap, Edge of Extinction
Disable Edge of Extinction. Cast it manually just before the enemies arrive.
Attribute Points
Beast mastery 11+1+2
Expertise 10+1
Wilderness Survival 10+2

Usage of the build
The heroes will automatically cast all spirits without the ones being disabled. While they are doing this just walk towards the gate and go stand a bit on the right side so your ranger hero ends up in the middle of the gate. Cast Serpent's Quickness and keep casting as many traps. Put down Flame Trap on your monk as often as possible as well. When the enemy is getting close go stand behind the traps and put down the 2 disabled spirits (Frozen Soil, Edge of Extinction). Just wait and see and get ready for the next team.

However there are 2 teams you have to handle differently. The degen team and the elementalist spikers.

Against the degen team you have to make sure that tahlkora casts Spell Breaker before the enemy arrives. Otherwise she will never get another skill of the ground. Personally i cast spell breaker just before the frozen soil spirit. In the beginning you don't need the healing protection against that team anyway.

When you see that the elementalists team is your opponent walk back as far as possible and cast the 2 spirits there. Wait till the elementalists hit the traps and throw on your nuke immediatly on the few elementalists that keeps standing just behind the traps (cast glyph of sacrifice first). Kill of the elementalists. If they make a heal-ball then use the nuke of your hero to interrupt it and they will fall down shortly after (and not only from the knockdowns :D).

This is the build Fox gave me and still works fine for me. I dunno or he already made a better build but if he did i wouldn't mind him to post it here If anything is unclear or it is too much information for now and you want to see it in-game just ask me when i am on and i will take you with.

An idea I was thinking about at work today sounded good on paper at least. Take Psilons, but with a specific set of tech rules to limit them enough to make it interesting. I was debating something like an all = (like we set all research to the same level) tech game, where we researched everything in order. We'd be slowed down (maybe) by the fact that we'd have to get EVERY tech to advance. When you are Psilons, that's a lot.

In order to deal with the miniturization effects, I thought it would be a good idea to at least ban smalls (besides scouts) with preference (or maybe rules) making large ships (only) the hull size of choice. This should hamper our abilities enough, early enough to make it a good game.

I'm not sure if it's really a good idea though. I think it's fun deciding which tech to pick, and I'm not even too sure that we'd be slowed enough to NOT run away. Smaller galaxy maybe, like a medium, and definitely impossible would be the choices there.

If anyone has any ideas to add (or take away, or a completely different idea) feel free to post.

I am new to the RB civ epics....my screenname on civ4 warlords is italiano....so far i know only 2 ppl that are involved here....atlas and....speaker -_-........any1 care to introduce me to how things work around here>

Removed by Clovis

Most of this is for GvG purposes but some will apply to all forms of PvP.

First off, it's very important to get used to using your number. Yes, we're all familiar enough by now to know what each other's voices sound like, but in the heat of battle it is a lot faster and helps reaction time (especially for monks) if you use your number rather than just saying "I." This is part of the reason we use our numbers at the start of a match to signify we're ready, rather than everyone using a 1.

"Watch #" - This person is expected to take a lot of damage in the near future and probably is about to be, or in the process of being, spiked.

"Condition/Hex on #" - The person has a specific condition/hex on them which is preventing them from being effective, but it can be removed by a single removal skill (i.e. Dismiss Condition).

"Condition/Hex on # and it's buried" - There's a hex on the person that's preventing them from being effective but it's not the top hex so single removal won't take it off.

"Train on #" - The person is being followed around by 2 or more melee characters and won't be able to do much since, if they stop to cast, they're going to take a lot of damage that's potentially lethal.

"Coming out with a flag" & "Bringing the flag in" - This is used exclusively (duh) by the flag runner and is to let the monks know they need to prot and watch them carefully.

"Low energy on #" - Mostly used by monks to let people know when they're starting to get low on energy (another duh).

"Using emergency energy" - Used by the monks when they're running their emergency energy weapon swap, i.e. +15/-1 items. This is probably the most important one for monks to make known to the rest of the team.

Other important things to say:
- What elites the enemy team members are using. Use their number for this as well (i.e. "Their 3 has Mantra of Recovery")
- Which monk on their team is the infuser (i.e. "6 is their infuser").
- What you've caught with Diversion, if you're a mesmer.
- If you managed to score a lucky interrupt with Distracting Shot (i.e. RoF).
- When you're setting up a ward, if you're a ward ele (i.e. "Ward Harm (going) up")
- When a warrior (or other melee) is overextended. This goes for both our team and the opponent team (i.e. "1 you're too far out" or "this warrior's overextended")

There are other things you can/should announce, but these should give you an idea of what's important. It's also important to be as concise as you can when you're announcing things.

What you should not be saying:
- Who you think should be a target.*
- What you think the team should be doing.*
* These fall exclusively on the shoulders of the team leaders. If they want suggestions that's fine, otherwise you're just creating confusion. Also, in a similar vein but not dealing with voice chat, the team leaders are the only ones who should be using the compass and calling targets. Unless they ask you to point someone out for them (i.e. an overextended war in the middle of a clump of minions or a base) calling targets is something done exclusively by the leaders.

So we tried out something like the latest build in our "split tactics" thread last night. It still took a while to set up with wyrm/hawk coming a bit late, for SF to get back from AFK, and to find ZoSer Mercedes and Basiner Earendil to fill our last two slots. We finally got going around 9:30ish and had a match on Uncharted, afterwards Earendil had to leave but Seijin then miraculously showed up and schooled Damadmoo in how to play a mesmer.

I played the R/Mo leading our split squad with Mercedes as a Discord Necro and Hawk on the ZB monk, so I'm only going to be talking from that perspective. Up to someone else to do the "main" report. Seems we are stuck at our rating of 1000, we won matches against much lower and one fairly even guild, and lost to 500+ ranked guilds, one of whom was gesting members from [cow].

The ranger/discord necro combo proved very effective at quickly cleaning a base of NPCs. It was also strong enough to still kill NPCs against a monk flagger and sometimes even the flagger themselves. We didn't fare so well as a split team though. There were times when 6+ came back to their base to try and push us out, often I was too slow in signaling a retreat or they had a snare such as water ele with them. In the other cases where there were only 3 or 4 which we should've theoretically been able to fight out, Hawk ended up dying pretty quickly anyway.

In the last match I was able to watch on observer, I actually ran when I shouldn't have: a melandru derv, ranger, and water flagger went back to base. When we ran hawk got snared and hit with scythe crits. Instead of that, we probably should have stayed and fought it out. When snared and no way to remove it, the better thing to do is *not* to run while a melee wails on you, since the enemy just gets free crits in that case. Against something slow like a scythe you can even time moving and not moving so you're still when the scythe lands. With no monk on their team, we probably should've been able to prevail. I just sucked at figuring that out because I use TAB too much to cycle through enemies, which isn't very effective when you are surrounded by NPC archers.

Some of our split failure may be partly attributed to Hawk's inexperience with one of the most challenging classes in the game in a solo self-protection situation. (RA/TA practice FTW!) It may be that the ranger needs to bring some cripple to better protect the monk (although shadow of fear should be doing this job in theory), or that as a ranger I need to work on staying close to hawk so I can use mending touch to save her from a spike, or that the necro needs draw conditions or something else. In our more losing matches featuring burst assassins, I felt I had to keep hawk with the main group just to keep the other monks from dying while me and mercedes continued sniping npcs. So in effect most of the time we ended up playing as a gank squad than a true split. Conclusion: more training needed.

Civilization: England, Elizabeth
Difficulty: Monarch
Map: Custom continents
AIs: 5, random
Speed: Epic OR Normal
Version: Civ 1.61



There are 2 save games available, identical in all respects except for the game speed. Chose either save for whatever reason you wish: the speed you enjoy or the speed you believe will score you more points. Players of both saves will be scored together.

Scenario Concept: All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. Your civilization is fanatical about bringing art to the world. By force if necessary. Your civ *cough* "shuns" scientists, merchants and priests. Engineers are (just about) tolerated because they construct grand buildings to display your art.

Variant Rules: Please pay attention to the rules and scoring! Printing them out is wise.

1. You may not build any wonders (world or national) that generate GP points other than artist or engineer points. Parthenon=good, Oracle=bad. Heroic Epic=good, Scotland Yard=bad. This means no shrines too. There is 1 exception: You may build the United Nations.

2. You may not build any city improvements that allow the employment of scientist, merchant or priest specialists. Theatres and forges=good, markets and temples=bad. If you accidentally break this rule, carry on with the game but you will lose points (see below). There is 1 exception: You may build 1 library in the city you intend to build the national epic. But do not intentionally hire any scientists.

Any accidental non-artist, non-engineer GPs must be deleted.

3. In war, all AI cities must be razed, not captured. Barbarian cities are OK to capture.

EDIT: 4. If using caste system, do not intentionally hire scientists or merchants

Scoring: This is a scored event.

20 pts - For winning the game
3 pts - Per great artist you acquire
3 pts - Per (legal!) world wonder (not project) built
1 pt - Per broadcast tower your civilization contains at the end of the game
2 pts - Per city you control of size 10 or greater at the end of the game
5 pts - For building The Internet

8 pts - Earliest conquest win
8 pts - Earliest domination win
8 pts - Earliest diplomatic win
8 pts - Earliest space win
8 pts - Earliest cultural win
5 pts - First to Drama
5 pts - First to Mass Media
5 pts - First to build the Globe Theatre
5 pts - First to make contact with all 5 AI civs
5 pts - Highest culture in 1500 AD in a single city. Great works do not count, so subtract the culture each city gained from any great works.

You lose 10 points every time you break a rule (illegal building, keeping a captured city etc). But keep on playing!

The event will close 3 weeks on Monday, April 2nd. Please report in the Tournament subforum, together with all information you require to be scored, before the end of Tuesday, April 3rd. Saves are attached.

EDIT: 19/3/07: If starting the game now, please use the normal speed save. There is a slight problem with the epic one.

I am all for playing the hand dealt and so on, and don't mind if I loose a game, when it was fun playing. But this start is silly.
Any clever opening strategies?
Anyone?
Monarch, huge, 18civs, continents, playing Ghengis.