I won't have a game ready for tonight.

A couple of people have offered suggestions for events, but I have not had the focus to give them consideration as yet. We are still stuck in the limbo of not having any truly solid builds to work with. ... The unexpectedly low interest in Warlords seems to point us back toward v161 for the moment. I do not have any magic bullets for its problems, though. Complex variants, wild or involved scoring, etc, can lead to some exploration, but it is still likely that the known best paths will be adapted in some way to cover them.

I intended to carry the Epics Redux to Epic Twelve, The Gauntlet, and then halt the replays and open things wide. ... The community seems to have settled on the notion that Epic Speed is its favorite, and that Adventures in general are less desirable just for not being on Epic speed. ... I may shelve the Adventures series as a result. I think it served us well, but its time seems to have passed. I will also halt the redux now. It's been a year, and I never imagined in my wildest dreams that we'd post only nine Epics over a whole year. We have lost a lot of time to patching and expansion efforts and builds that, incredibly, have gone not as well as their Civ3 counterparts in terms of moving the game forward from its initial state.

Epic Ten will be something new.


I will work to come up with an event in the next few days. Until then...


- Sirian

Hi all,

Just recently began to play the game again after months, and to say the least I am quiet rusty (not that I was much good to begin with).

Anyway, started a warlords game, noble difficulty, random everything. At this point, I am slighty frustrated. I am leader in techs, I have some good cities (i think), yet I am near the bottom in score.

I was wondering if some of you could take a look at this game and give me some advice on what I am doing wrong and what I need to do to increase my score.

I specially would like advice on what to do at my capital and specially cuzco, as both of them seem like perfect places for great people (specially cuzco) yet I am not sure if I am doing it correctly.

Thanks for the help!

EDIT: Oops thought I had uploaded the game...its good now, should be fine. Thanks

Should have its own thread, not stuck in the backlogs GvG.

I find the isle of meditation ugly, an inconvenience, and utterly overused. I propose we change it. I've given a celestial sigil to Sir Damadmoo for safekeeping, though can readily buy more.

If you're interested in a different Hall, please put down your top three favorites here:

Guild halls can be previewed from the Canthan ambassadors in the Great Temple of Balthazar, Major Cities (LA, Kama, Kaineng) or online here (with commentary on features):
http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Guild_Hall

1. Solitude
2. Frozen
3. Wurm

Let's try to get a consensus by Jan 20th from 10+ players.

I know most people don't view the alliance forums and don't have any real interest to do so. However, there are a few things going on over there that you should be aware of.

First off, a new guild, Order of the Mursaat, has applied for membership, thread here. You should check it out and check them out to see if you think they'd be a good fit with the alliance and to cast your vote (when/if the poll shows up).

For these next 2, you'll need to sign up on the alliance forums and get permission (post here) to access them before you can view/participate.

Secondly, there's discussion now of restructuring the alliance so that there are officers to handle most of the issues that come about. Discussion Thread. If it goes through it'll wind up requiring 2 members (number not set yet) from each guild to participate. This is an important topic of discussion, so you're urged to weigh in.

Finally, there's another discussion going on about having a monthly alliance event similar to the Deep Day and Sorrow's Furnace event. Discussion Thread.

I think it's important for people to get more involved in this stuff and I'll most likely be bringing it up on guild chat every now and then.

I just noticed that it's the 10th of January, which, albeit slightly belated, marks the 2 year anniversary of the RBGW guild in its current form (aka when guilds became permanent). I, for one, can hardly believe how long it's been.

Looking back over the past 2 years there have been a lot of good times as well as some dramatic bad ones. I can still remember going through Gates of Kryta many times with people, one time using Remy as a smiter and trying to PBAoE my way through the undead with only Symbol of Wrath and Smite; or another time when we covered the entire map trying to find out where to go for the bonus. Then there were our first few excursions into PvP via TA... Soul Flayer trying to get us to use a ranger/pet build and me trying to get ranger spike going with 3 rangers and an OoV necro.

How about you guys? Any special rememberances? More importantly, should we have some sort of festivities to celebrate the occasion?

I'm trying to complete an outline for a game proposal, and am having trouble working out how to score it without rewarding players for delaying the victory (aka milking).

So presumably I need a secondary source of score, which provides a pressure against prolonging the game. Once I've got a good option there, it's my responsibility to experiment with the balance of the scoring algorithm until it seems to encourage the kinds of choices I hope will be made. (side question: is it effective to run "regular" games through the scoring algorithm when tuning, or have folks found that the variants are too specific

What kinds of choices have sponsors found to be effective in the past?

I've considered fastest finish bonuses (bonus points for finishing first, or bonus points for how many turns ahead of the player who finished second), but I don't want to encourage players who estimate that they are out of the running to abandon finishing as quickly as they can, so that alone doesn't seem sufficient.

Therefore, I think I want a scoring rule that rewards the turn of finish. So I could do something turn based, or something year based (which has a steeper scale in the earlier years - an interesting possibility).

Since I do want people experimenting within the primary scoring framework, perhaps I could rig things so that the primary scoring framework only applies up to a particular date.

In short, I'm trying to avoid re-inventing the wheel here. Does anybody have suggestions, so that I can shortcut the work of reviewing mumble years of epics trying to figure out if the scoring actually promoted the behavior the sponsors intended.

Lately I've been playing a lot of games using the BetterAI mod. I can win on Noble fine. But when I go up to Prince I have yet to finish a game that some AI civ didn't win a Cultural Victory.

What's the best defense against a cultural victory? Do you need to just go to war w/ the civ that you see get its first legendary culture city? Go for the obvious high culture cities and take/raze them?

Thanks for any tips.

Just saw a post about this from a beter tester in the LL, it's an upcoming light-hearted online-only diablo clone published under NCSoft. The game is free to download and play, although there a special privledges if you pay $5 a month, which mainly consist of better loot.

It just crossed my mind that RBers could quite abuse this marketing structure. Imagine a weekly team game where we tackle the hardest dungeons using the lowly non-member limitations... we could use the variant tag [POOR]!

Well, more people can try it out once it's released, it's just a funny thought at the moment.

So I have some free time this afternoon, so I decided to fire up a game of MOO. I wanted a little bit of a challenge, so I took the Mrrshan, five opponents, hard map. Well, look what the ol' game generator decided to saddle me with (see attachment). That's obviously a menage screenshot. First off we drew the 4 hardest races as opponents. Second, the only planet in range is Poor (though it is size 90). The red circle is Orion, so it's going to require range 6 to get to that yellow star in the back, which did turn out to hold a normal size 90. What are those yellow circles on the map, you ask? Why they are the probable locations of the Silicoid homeworld, seeing as how I've already encountered their scouts at the blue Dead

I've honestly never seen a more bleak starting prospect than this. The ONLY saving grace is that it is Hard instead of Impossible. So, here's my question to the MOO community: Successon game anyone? I've saved the game one turn after this picture was taken. I'm actually not in the mood for this kind of game today (I wanted a LITTLE challenge, not a spanking ) We will, in all likelihood, be stomped, but think of the glory if we manage to pull it out :kisskiss: If we decide not to go this route, I'll still post the save so that people can try it individually.

dathon

Well, normally I'm anti-whining about CIV because I love the game, but I'm going to have a bit of a vent here. Well, maybe you could refer to it as a mild grumble.

We Have Enough On Our Hands (WHEOOH) is horrible.

When a civ that isn't at war says this, it has decided to go to war and there is nothing you can do to about it. You don't know who it has decided to attack, but you know it will happen and will do so once its first attacking stack has reached the borders. Most of the time you can have an educated guess about who the victim will be.

That's not the problem. The problem is, playing optimally, you should check every civ every turn to see if someone has enough on their hands. This is very time consuming. For every civ that isn't at war, a vassal or friendly, you have to click on their name, wait for the animated leaderhead to appear, click "we would like to trade", then scroll down to the "declare war on" section on the left, hover over a civ's name, see what they say and then press escape. That's pretty time consuming action to repeat every turn, especially when you have 17 opposition civs like in the current SGOTM.

Now no one actually does this - life is too short. The problem is that you get a massive benefit from doing so. Being able to predict wars before they happen is huge. Say if a neighbour declares on you. Do you send over all of your forces to defend that front, leaving (an)other front(s) with minimal garrison? If you do, you have a much better chance of fighting off the attack, but risk losing cities to attack from a different civ. With careful checking of WHEOOH, you can predict attacks before they happen and send troops back to defend cities near the WHEOOH civ's border instead of perhaps advancing in the other direction. I know a few players check WHEOOH occasionally, even often, but a few turns is massive and it's really only luck as to if you spot it soon after they have become WHEOOH. Even a single turn can mean the difference between getting enough troops back or having the city razed. It's not just declaring on you. If you know a civ will attack another, you can get troops in the area to possibly poach cities or culture-bomb cities in resistance.

Another factor is that if you think a civ is going to declare on you, giving into demands will not change their decision - so it is usually incorrect to do so. If you did not know they are WHEOOH, the correct decision may well be to give in to the demand.

I realise the reasons for WHEOOH being there, and I realise I am describing a problem without presenting a solution. But if this a big frustration to me then it just shows how good everything else about the game is. Happy new year.