... And here's what you get.

Damn Yankees

The NORTH AMERICAN PRE-ORDER INCLUDES:

* A key that provides access to the Factions Preview Event on March 24th
* Access to Guild Wars Factions twenty-four hours before the official release date
* Exclusive in-game items—one unique item for each of the two new professions
* A "friend" key that gives one of your friends access to the Factions Preview Event on March 24th
* A 14-day, 10-hour trial of Guild Wars (original Prophecies campaign)
* A tactical guide
* A quick-reference card
* A CD that includes concept art, wallpapers, and in-game trailers

One bundle, but a pretty well-stacked one. Mucho useful if you don't own the original Guild Wars in that it gives you a 10-hour trial of the original Prophecies campaign.

Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys & The Rest of Europstan

THE EUROPEAN ONLINE PRE-ORDER (no box or contents)
Beginning March 3rd, European customers can visit their favorite online retailer to pre-order Guild Wars Factions online. The online pre-order will include:

* A key that provides access to the Factions Preview Event on March 24th
* Access to Guild Wars Factions twenty-four hours before the official release date
* Exclusive in-game items—one unique item for each of the two new professions
* A "friend" key that gives one of your friends access to the Factions Preview Event on March 24th


THE EUROPEAN BOXED PRE-ORDER PACK
The European boxed Pre-Order Pack will be available in stores on March 31st and will include all of the items available in the online pre-order plus:

* A tactical guide and quick-reference card PDF in five different languages
* A CD that includes concept art, wallpapers, in-game movies, and Factions music
* A Guild Wars Factions poster

So two packages: The online edition arriving later and is less-featured than the well endowed US package, and the boxed edition misses the beta event in its entirity and only has a poster that's not included in the US package. Plus, we have to print out the tactical guide and quick-reference card which is no biggie (Who actually reads the quickref that came with the original Guild Wars boxed package?)

So let's do a tally. If you're an European and order both packages (Like I'm planning on doing to feed both my accounts) you get:

* A poster, which the Americans are already bitching about. (That's good)
* No GW trial. (That's bad)
* Two accounts. (That's good)
* One account that misses the beta. (That's horrendous)
* Essentially the same as the rest of the package (That's expected)
* We only get PDFs of the card and guide in the boxed set. (That's... counterproductive)

Also, looking at the prices, Factions is priced higher than Guild Wars. Yeah, I know they're toting it as a stand-alone game that could slot into the original, but I'd think the prices should be more agreeable.

Ouch.

I found something fishy in Civ4 regarding spying out foreign submarines. I want to report this somewhere and guess RB is probably not the right place. However, I searched the CivFanatics forums and it turns out there was already some sort of submarine bug in Civ3 (raising a lot of comments), which makes it very hard to see whether the Civ4 submarine bug was already reported or not.
So if anyone knows a good place to report that, please tell me.
Just so that you know the bug / feature I am talking about:
The military advisor screen reveals foreign submarines even if there is no human owned destroyer around or a spy in a city.
I have taken screenshots to illustrate that.
If you cannot restrain yourself from cheking the screen regularily, it helps quite a bit protecting your sea food and off shore assets.

So, I'm thinking, as we wait for the next patch and epic, as we really have nothing much to play right now, perhaps a nice, easy gentle adventure ~ even an 'unsanctioned, unofficial' one??

in my head i was knocking around an idea:

"Hedgemon! A Gentle Adventure"

basically, the idea is:
America (not sure of leader)
Warlord or Noble
Terra map, with all civs on the "old world," only america in 'new;'

the object is to *cough, cough* replicate the modern world and win ONLY a cultural victory. Also, you can only switch to the "free" civics (e.g., speech, religion, markets, suffrage, emancipation), and never have a state religion.

I was leaning more towards noble, and adding in a couple religious civs so that a religion is a tougher possibility

what's anybody else's take on this??

What exactly is the bonus for a city in WLTX? Is it worth pursuing? Are some city types (commerce vs FPP vs ???) better to try and get a WLTX?

What exactly triggers a WLTX? Sorry if this has been asked before but I couldn't find any information on it.

Gotag

Massive Monks on Strike in THK!!




Expect the strike to spill into ToA where it counts...

I have to go to work, expect a full report from Drasca or Foxbat...


KoP

Adventure Two results are up. Since the last unscored game was listed A-Z, this time I decided to list results Z-A. This still leaves players like Majromax out in the cold, but it's the best I can do.

This is another game in which I get to say congrats to the AI on its second-fastest launch.

Also, thanks to Kylearan for compiling these.

In the spirit of "it ain't getting done unless someone does it," and "if you want something done right...", I'd like to start discussion about the eventual RB Community mod approval process.

From the perspective of the RB Community, mods (approved for tournament games) should improve the overall flexibility of Civ4, but not change it substantially (or, indeed, at all). Some of the most popular mods seem at least marginally useful, and already we've had someone finish Adventure 4 with a shadow game because of the use of Blue Marble.

As I see it, mods broadly fall into 4 categories:

1. Entirely cosmetic mods change or otherwise replace some of the stock Civ4 graphics with custom ones. Blue Marble is the supreme example of this: it doesn't make any gameplay changes, but entierly replaces the terrain sets. Also, (before, I believe, the latest patch), the commerce-icon mod would fall under this category.
   
   These mods, in theory, don't make any new information available to the player, and are there primarily for aesthetic reasons.
   
2. "Presentational" mods change, in some way, the interface of the game -- generally speaking, they'd make some aspect of the game's interface easier to use or more informative. The "improved" city management screen is one example, as is an "improved" foreign relation screen.
   
   These mods can correct preceived flaws in the game's interface, but they are on a much shakier ground -- it is easy to reveal more information than the player should actually have. For example, at least one version of the foreign advisor mod allowed players to see how much gold an AI had for trade, even when the AI was in a "refuses to talk" stage of war declaration.
   
   Mods which enchance the Civilopedia would probably also fall under this category, as would a hypothetical mod that changes (in some way) the combat odds display.
   
3. "Utility" mods don't change the game itself, but provide some sort of additional functionality to the game player. The Autolog is probably the most popular example of a mod in this category. Likewise, anything that alters the "blue circle" advisor recommendations would fit here.
   
4. "Content" mods change, in some basic way, the game's content. Anything which adds or changes a civ, tech, unit, terrain feature, improvement, resource, AI, or anything else actually used in Civ rules resolution would fall under this category. Since playing with one of these mods is, in a very fundamental way, not playing the same game of Civ as everyone else, these sorts of mods should be categorically banned. The only exception would be if some RB Torunament game actually requied one, such as the Civ3 epic that ran on "one food/square" rules.
   

1. I recommend that mod approval discussion take place in the RB forums. Ideally, this would be as a subforum of the Civ forum, perhaps "Mod approval forum" or some other snappy name.
   
2. Mods should always be submitted for approval by a member of the RB community (possibly, and preferably, the mod's author, but maybe not always.) The onus is on the submittor to show that the mod does not change the game in any substantial way. It is the responsibility of the submittor to answer any reasonable questions from the RB community about the details of the mod, including (and especially!) posting screenshots illustrating its behaviour. Any questions (up through and including examining the mod's XML, Python, or (post-SDK) C++ code) are fair game.
   
3. A mod submitted for approval should already be a relatively popular mod. If someone tries to submit "Bob's Civ4 Mod 1.521111one" and nobody here besides the submittor uses it, it's unlikely that there will be enough information to reach an informed decision.
   
4. A mod will only be approved by the universal acclaim of the community. I don't see a need for a "manager" here, since I anticipate that the approved list will remain short (under a dozen mods, or so?)
   
5. Mods will only be approved in specific versions -- if "Bob's Civ4 Mod 1.52" gets approved, "Bob's Civ4 Mod 1.53" will still need at least a lookthrough. Approval should only be routinely granted for bugfix releases, since new features might very well change whether the mod is appropriate.
   
   That being said, generally only the latest version of a mod will remain approved; once 1.53 gets the Okay, 1.52 is deprecated and verboten in all new games. This should keep the list of approved mods even smaller.
   
6. "Amalgamation" mods -- those that combine, say, "Bob's Civ4 Mod," "Joe's Civ4 Mod," and "Jerry's Super Pizza Icon Mod," should generally not be submitted. We should go for small changes, folks.
   

This is completely off-topic, but I like the RB community so I thought I'd ask here.

My girlfriend's just starting a online hobby/semi-business; she makes wooden (decorative) hairsticks. She's gotten private orders in the past week, and would pretty soon like to set up a real, bona-fide storefront website. Since her birthday's also (coincidentally) coming up in about a week and a half, I'd like to get her set up as much as I can and surprise her.

I have enough experience with programming/websites that I can probably handle the technical end of the storefront just fine (or learn realquicklike if I don't know it already), but since I haven't done this before I don't know too much about the gamut of hosting sites.

I don't need too much in the way of bells and whistles from a hosting service; storage requirements and bandwidth transfer will likely be pretty minimal (<50MB storage, probably <500MB/mo). Enough scripting-allowed to set up a shopping cart of some sort is highly desired (likely meaning Perl, PHP, with limited database access); an already-setup shopping cart would be a nice plus, but isn't necessary.

Paypal will probably be used for credit card verification for the short/medium term, so I'm not too worried about the storefront itself -- Paypal itself has limited services of the sort, including its own https servers for the credit card entry. It'd be nice to have a real, custom shopping cart either soon or medium-term, though, which would require eventual https services.

Has anyone here done something of this sort before? Any recommendiations either as to which hosting service to use, or something more specific to look for?

Well, I was only kidding when I said lets run Half Moons to Droks from Beacon's...

Who are these runners with RB capes?

So I downloaded the final components of the game almost the minute they were available. I took over half an hour drinking in the game setup process, the new graphics and music. The game sounds and looks very good, in my opinion. Most of the old options are back but some new ones exist.

My first game, I started with AIs on top of me, no room to expand. OCC or Zergling Rush, take my pick? I quit that and restarted.

My second game, there's one juicy planet in range, about equidistant between myself and the Altarian, and his colony ship beelined straight there, beating mine out by half a turn. That's it, no colony for me. ... Maybe if I'm lucky, my colony ship can wander around in the dark and find a home, eventually -- no, wait. There seem to be range limits on the ships! ... What am I supposed to do with these maps? Where do I dial up the MinDistance variables in the XML to correct this. ... They made the maps smaller, and they were already pretty small last time out. (A lot of players played only on the biggest size maps -- I was one of the few max difficulty players who played the full variety.)

I'm certainly biased about my own map creations and balancing efforts, but... Expansion is the most compelling part of the genre. How can shortchanging that on your default settings possibly be a good thing?

I started a third game on a Large galaxy and seemed to get some breathing space. There were six star systems in my neck of the woods. In these, there would turn out to be one good planet and I rolled lucky and chose to send my initial colony ship in the correct direction to find it right away. Trying to deal with the rest of my local stars did not go so well. Long story short, I built another colony ship and a scout and sent them around through the back lines looking at the other four stars, which all turned out to have nothing useful. Before I could get my colony ship back home to settle Mars (a poor but habitable planet in Earth's home system) an Alien beelined his colony ship there and grabbed it right out from under my nose!

Managing my economy, there are areas of waste, where spending just goes up in smoke. Trying to prevent, or more likely limit, the waste, is an exercise in micromanagement, and to make matters worse, the interface was not lending itself well to lots of micro of this type. (At least I remember it being easier to do the same kind of micro in GC1). The new planet system makes it harder to get a handle on the economic formula. In one sense that might be good, but short term it means a lot more up-front complexity. (The old system was Civ-like, in that you could build one of each type of building. Now that you can instead build X buildings on this planet and Y buildings on that one, well... there's more freedom, but also a lot more calculation involved in winnowing your way to a successful outcome.)


My initial review is a mixed bag. I know it is unfair to GC2, but Civ4 has raised the bar in so many ways (and I was in there pushing it up). I find it frustrating and even painful for there to be so much economic waste in the system. There's at least the same amount as was in GC1 if not more thanks to the new planetary buildings system. We can almost stop right there, because for me personally, this is already a halting problem. A lot of the gameplay in GC1 was about minimizing waste. Civ3 was the same way. I find that I can't really go back there any more. Getting in there and messing with the sliders and settings on every turn has my eyes bugging out after just a couple of hours. Since mastering that process is integral to mastering the game on the whole (at least up to a player's maximum potential for success) I won't be going there. ... More on this in a bit.

The starting conditions haven't changed either. You start with one military ship and one colony ship. It's the Civ equivalent of starting with a second settler and a warrior, except that instead of being able to move in almost any direction on the land and be able to settle there when you arrive, there is at most one or two right answers out there in the fog, and several wrong answers, and it's a Big Huge Dice Roll™ for you to guess. ... GC1 was like this too and I worked around it with spoiler infomation, exploring a map and then restarting, because it was just too dumb for my whole game to turn on whether I guessed correctly on where to send my first colony ship or how many more colony ships to build. ... I suppose I can go back to the same type of spoiler info again to work around this gambling element, but I am less than enthused about it. (Civ4's expansion phase is a lot less harried. You get to scout around to a greater or lesser extent and there are more options for how, where and when to expand. In GC, expansion is like in Civ3: the faster the better, the more the better, except the options are much more narrow.)

There are some frustrations about the ship-designing section, too. I wanted to look at the specs on the existing ship designs and couldn't seem to get those. Some stats, yes, but not the "this is how this is put together" display.


There is some good stuff in here, behind the mechanical items that are getting in my way. Honestly, my first urge is just to go start a new game of Civ4 instead. That's not the urge I want to be having. I got over fifty games out of GalCiv1, almost as many as I got out of Civ3 counting both expansions; however, I ran the course with the GalCiv1 gameplay and its attendant imbalances, annoyances and flaws, and most of those issues are still with the game! I feel very much like I did about Civ2 when I first saw it, which is, "Hey, why didn't you guys fix the GAMEPLAY problems?" My Civ1 burnout was legendary beyond measure and the franchise had to move a long way before it could attract me back. I skipped Colonization, Civ2, and SMAC, waiting literally a decade for Civ3 to improve on enough of the things that finally ended my intense love affair with Civ1 for me to enjoy the game again. ... GalCiv2 has dramatically improved graphics, sound, polish, and most likely the space warfare. That's a lot! But the economics are essentially unchanged, at first blush. That may be more than I can overcome.

I'm willing, at this point, to go with lower difficulty and some kind of process that accepts a certain degree of economic waste and inefficiency in exchange for not having to micromanage to such a painful extent, but... There is still the problem of having to THINK THROUGH this economy to macromanage it. I'm not sure I can accept the waste. (I could not accept it from the Civ3 governors. It just drove me crazy! I could not take my attention off it, and that was fatal for my efforts to pull the same trick on Civ3, back when I tried it.)

I am not giving up on it after just a couple of hours. I've got two years of Civ4 under my belt though (and worse, the ability to nag Soren to fix these kinds of issues when I found them -- and man did we fix a bunch of them!) Those of you fresh off of Civ3 and the land of endless micro, or those of you who never played GC1, may find the economics do not bother you.

I hope to have a more favorable report to offer after adjusting for some of these issues and giving the game a chance to make a second impression beyond them.


- Sirian