Deraldin

Cazadors are nasty. I got my butt whooped by the young ones. They're just too fast. Trying to shoot them off in real time is a huge pain in the ass, but they're so much easier with VATS it's practically cheating.

Yeah, I did something similar. I ran into a sign saying, "Warning! Deathclaws up ahead" and naturally I went "Huh? Where?" and continued walking. Then I saw a claw swoop across the screen and my lifeless body being thrown against a rock. I went through there but didn't find any deathclaws. Walked along the tops of the hills and saw about a dozen Cazadors ahead of me so I run away.

That's your wild wasteland perk kicking in with an encounter that wouldn't normally be there.

It's listed on my account.

Aw, I loved those guys. So much more fun to hear footsteps behind you as you race along rather than getting shot. Depending on the area, you can usually find a cop with a gun that you can take which allows you to just shoot the tazer ninjas. Or you could learn the patterns and take them out in melee. Personally, I liked keeping them right behind me so that I could jump off buildings at the end of a chase, turn around mid-air and flip them off.

Bugs don't really bother me too much. Crashes are what get to me. That said, Fallout 3 + Obsidian. Was anyone really expecting a polished, bug-free experience?

If we're all figments of your psyche, then wouldn't the joke be on you? We seem to do a pretty good job of distracting you from important things.

Damn you whoever it was that linked me to this! It's 5am and I want to play Uplink now!

Someone isn't using his bioball effectively.

Meh. Half Life 2 was okay the first time around, but I can't stand the thought of playing it again.

You can actually rename units I believe. When you click on a unit, you get the little unit card thing in the bottom right corner. Somewhere on that it says "Edit". Click that and you should be able to change the name of the unit.

I can think of two more in the game. One of which isn't strictly required, but the other is on the critical path. Zeratul has one and so does Char.

Don't know how far along in the game you are, but nukes work to end this annoying bug. I had the same thing happen to me so I threw everything I had into research in order to tech up to nukes as fast as I could.

I has a pool!

I'm in the process of creating a large heated swimming pool with a viewing window in my soon to be tree garden/farm. It's a pain in the ass trying to collect all the lava that is required for this project. I haven't been able to connect my home base to a natural cave network so I can't just hop down a pick some up. I have to go overland, find a cave with an opening to the surface and then make my way all the way back down to where the lava is. I just came back from an expedition with 7 buckets of lava. I placed 5 of them. This stuff just doesn't spread anywhere near enough. Why can't there be infinite lava just like with water?

That makes 0 sense to me.. the larger you are > your world culture should be not less. But to get the Cultural Victory you need to complete 5 of the trees of "Tradition, Freedom, Liberty, Honor, Piety" etc.. and for every city beyond the first.. the total cost for each new one is increased by 15%.. So the more cities you have..the more is needed and the longer it takes... The question is where you can find the balance. I don't think you guys are quite getting his point. You're arguing from game mechanics. We all known how things work in the game. He's saying that a larger empire should have more culture than a smaller empire, simply because it's larger, has more people and therefore more creators and contributors to it's culture. If you track the amount of culture points that a given civilization has, this is quite possibly true, but as you get larger your get less benefit from each point and I think that was the main problem Harlequin had.

Annexing cities does increase your social policy cost. I jumped from 3500 to over 5500 temporarily while waiting for all my conquered Japanese cities to be razed to the ground.

Played a little bit of minecraft last night before bed. I was in the process of creating my underground tree farm when I was attacked by a skeleton. Scared the crap outta me. I had a 14x20 room with only two torches in it which apparently wasn't enough. I know it didn't spawn outside that room, because everything else was perfectly lit up. I had to retreat from the room which was a little difficult as I had cleared a coal vein right by the entrance which left a small pit in front of my doorway. It was a little difficult to maneuver around without looking so that I could keep my eye on the skeleton and it's goddamn arrows. I did make it out of the room, walled it off with dirt and ran upstairs to get some food. Came back and beat the crap out of the skeleton and tossed a few more torches around. Now I know that enemies don't need pitch blackness in order to spawn.

I got invited to play a session with Ed yesterday morning by some of the players already in the game. They had someone from last year that didn't show up to play this year so they had an opening. Sadly there were no goddesses to sleep with. There were two women, but they seemed to be missing some pieces that would have been required. If you want to know what happened, I've written up an account of the session, it's a little long, but here we go! The Adventures of Someone Else's Character! The party had been tasked with recovered the son of some important noble friend of our current employer. He had apparently been kidnapped by someone, apparently Zhentarim because that's who we ran into in the dungeon. At the start of the session that I joined, the party had just finished off a group of 6 Zhent soldiers and were continuing to explore. The next room was lined with heavy tapestries that we didn't bother looking at, because we were too busy staring at the two naked women in the room. Unfortunately, while they each had a nice rack, they were literally nothing but bones below that. They seemed quite nice and were more than willing to answer any questions we had, although they were more than a little interested in our organs. We gave them the bodies of two of the Zhent soldiers from the previous room. They ripped them open and started placing organs in their rib cages where they magically floated in place. We continued on to the next room which contained 6 doors along one wall and a bricked up passage in the middle of the far wall. The bricks turned out to be an illusion. On the other side was a 70'x70'x8' room filled with swords, all hanging point down. We could see about 5 dozen swords from the doorway before we couldn't see any farther back. This left a 4' clear space underneath all the swords. The wizard's detect magic showed that each sword had it's own magical effect, rather than a blanket effect. While the group talked about what to do, I perhaps foolishly touched one of the swords. The entire room was then filled with whirling swords of death that constantly clanged off the walls, ceiling, floor and each other. The rest of the party gave me dirty looks. We went back and checked the 6 doors in the previous room. Each had a 10'x10' room. The first had a floating skeleton with it arms hanging out in front of it, palms up. Above it's hands were several small whirling gems. They turned out to be an illusion, but anything placed above the palms of the skeleton would float in place. We dragged the skeleton along to carry our treasure. We also named him Stanley. For all your tool needs. The second door had a floating tabletop covered in fresh blood. Above it was a purple mist out of which 12 tentacles writhed. 8 of them were holding onto tiny medical instruments, while 4 had what looked like wands. When you approached them, they all swung towards you and seemed to beckon you closer. The next 3 had a stone pedestal with a small metal coffer. The first contained a bag of human knucklebones, the next had a blinking eye that when "attached" to yourself you could see from (this box was trapped with a glyph of blindness), I don't remember what was in the third. The last room had a skull in place of the coffer. The skull contained a ruby. When touch, a voice made some comment about touching the gem to one who is dead and they shall again know life. We argued for a bit about how to get past the swords of death while one guy went back to collect the nice shiny black armour that the Zhents were wearing. On his way back to us he asked the two skeletal women if there was a way past the swords. They said all he had to do was touch the altar. So he did. When he hadn't come back for awhile so the rest of us went to investigate. We found him slumped over the altar, fast asleep with the two women mostly ignoring him. They explained that he was only going to hurt himself if he kept it up and this was the only way past the swords. The rest of us politely declined and asked the women to wake him up. The cast a dispel magic on him and he was good as new. We tested the Zhent armour by tossing one of the corpses into the sword room and while the swords clanged off him, his corpse was unharmed. We decided to suit up with the new armour and we even had an extra set for Stanley! The door on the other side led to a short hallway with a black, heavy tapestry strung across the doorway, with a slit down the middle to pass through. On the other side was a large cavern. All the stalactites and stalagmites had been chopped down to a couple inches while little sparks of electricity zapped about every few seconds. The room was also filled with floating eyeballs and skeletal hands. The thief went to scout around, but the eyeballs spotted her and swiveled on the spot to follow her while the hands all begin to point in her direction. She began to feel something pushing her back towards the wall. Two balls of bones were tossed, one down the hall and one towards the thief. When they hit the ground they each formed two skeletons. The thief dropped a bag of marbles so where her skeletons stood up they all fell down again, so she fell on them and just started rolling, still wearing the Zhent armour and tried to crush the skeletons. It does blunt damage! The wizard took the blinking eye from early and entered the cavern where a disembodied voice talked to him. It was the guardian of a tomb and was trying to keep Zhents out. Since we were wearing their armour I think you can guess why it attacked us. We told it what we were after and promised to leave the tomb alone and it dissolved the skeletons and let us go. Next room we came was a circular room with a stone archway and a door standing in the middle of the room. The doorway led to a room with a table at which there were 14 individuals seated. 12 men in black robes, the noble we were supposed to rescue, tied to a chair, and another nobleman who looked quite similar to the first, except dressed all in black and armed. Turns out he was the brother of the first noble. He wanted us to bring his father there and if we would be so kind as to leave someone behind to make sure that we came back. We agreed and left the thief. Before heading out of the dungeon we tried the portal, two of the men in robes from the other door were standing there and told us to leave. One of our clerics took out the first man with a cause serious wounds while the other just scream and *pop* went invisible. We decided to leave. Meanwhile the thief is being ganged up on by the rest of the robed figures, she ducks under the table and into a trap door, just racing as fast as she can with the figures right behind her. Turns out the trap door led to the portal and she caught up to us in the big cavern with the eyeballs. We asked the voice to help us and he fried all the remaining robed figures that were chasing us. Deciding that these guys were probably up to no good, we went back to the door and marched in, towing Stanley (dressed "head to toe" in Zhent armour) and present him to the black nobleman as his father. His reaction was a "DAD?!" and he too winked out of view. We untied the noble we were sent to find and finished our adventure successfully. It was a lot of fun. Ed Greenwood has a great sense of humour. He runs a very rules light game that keeps things from getting to bogged down in minor details. That session took us about 5 hours to run through and it was definitely the highlight of my weekend at the convention. He didn't show up at the pub on Saturday night this time, but there is always next year. Somehow going back to Civ 5 just doesn't seem as awesome anymore...

2nd Ed D&D with Ed Greenwood as DM.

Only another 25 turns till my atomic bomb is ready! Then I need to transport it across half the continent to get it to Oda. My front line forces are in the process of being upgraded from riflemen to Mech Infantry. I also have a destroyer half way around the world that's picking off Songhai crossbows from offshore just for fun. :D

Can't speak for Catherine as I'm playing with Russia, but Oda is definitely aggressive and expansionist. He's been pounding on France and swallowing city states in my game. He tried to do the same to me, but he hasn't spent any money on upgrading units. Horsemen, Swordsmen and Pikemen were all no match for my great general supported Longswordsmen. I don't think I've lost a unit yet, but I've come real close a few times. He's got more cities than I do and he's done it in about 2/3rds of the space. Any open area around him and he'll plop a city in it. He was also the first to expand beyond 1 city on the continent.

Damn never ending peace treaty. I'm stuck at peace with Japan and have been this way for a good 100+ turns now. I have all my units arrayed right on his border ready to slaughter him (infantry/artillery vs musketmen/trebuchets), but no matter what I do, I can't seem to declare war against him. This continent is mine dammit!

The numbers are updated for the latest DLC according to the discussion page.