Reveilled

Not just any Ice Queen, but Queen Am no less! "

That's not big enough! No, you play the son of one of the lords of Baator...and your mother is no less than the Spider Queen, Lolth, herself! :D Alternatively, it turns out you Swashbuckler is actually the King of Somewhereland (perhaps you could even rename him Captain Gars) travelling in disguise, and simply by saying a certain codeword, he can summon up a huge army of forty million 20th level knights all equipped with +5 platemail and +10 bastard swords of instant death! Also, he has a special ability that can blow up the prime material plane as a free action. "

<{POST_SNAPBACK}> I'll have you know that I'm perfectly capable of using CivIV responsibly. I mean, okay, I may find myself staying up all night on occasion, and I might miss the odd week of university, but I assure you that I have my addi--err, I mean my moderate use of CivIV, entirely under control.

I loved the Aielund Trilogy. Try those.

Hmm...would this player by any chance be ten years old? " I mean, jeez, when I was playing D&D when I was ten, our group evidently had awful imaginations. We just gave everyone vorpal swords. My advice to you would be to join in. Talk to the DM about how your character is less powerful than everyone else, and either deserves a much higher level or the opportunity to add some extra things to him. ...Then make him a gold dragon in human form with a bratty 10-year-old gold dragon daughter.

Bah! I assure you it was nothing of the sort. It was Firefly Anyways, I guess I should do it now. *yawn* Though I'd much rather go to bed.

Sorry, I am aware the adjudication is today. I'm a bit occupied with stuff at the moment, but it'll be done by the end of the day. Promise. Cross my heart.

My god. Hasn't your group heard of the ECL system?

Uhh...shouldn't I have an army in Vienna as a result of that failed move? "

Maybe a Tasha Yar moment, then. "

Oh dear. If at all possible, Mets, could you do tomorrow's adjudication later in the day, rather than sooner? I've been a bit negligent in negotiation the past week. :">

Well, I bought Firefly yesterday, and so far I've watched four episodes. To be honest, the only thing I like about it is that it's TOTALLY FARKING INCREDIBLE. :D I especially liked the end of the swordfight in Shindig. Mal: "Mercy is the mark of a Great man." *jabs guy with sword* "Okay, so I'm only a good man." *jabs him again* "Ah, I'm alright."

Aye she be.

Urg. I'm swamped presently with work and revision for University exams and reports, which in addition to cutting into my time with CivIV, may adversely affect my ability to GM for a few days. So before anyone sends me any orders, I'm going to have to postpone adjudication until Saturday. Apologies.

Oh, and with regards to SMAC, the folks over at Apolyton are planning on recreating SMAC for CivIV, which may interest those of you who want to compare the two.

I think the mask looks awesome.

It's a lot like Alpha centauri, actually. A lot of what's new to the game, like the unit promotions, civics, and the UN, is taken either directly from SMAC or based on aspects of it. Obviously, it doesn't have the storyline or the atmosphere, and it doesn't have the 3D terrain, but such things are unavoidable with it being CivIV rather than SMACII. The voiceovers you get when you discover technologies are very poor compared to those of SMAC, sadly, and the wonder movies are nothing compared to those of Civ2 or SMAC (where SMAC mixed computer animation, video footage and spoken voiceovers to make great movies, in Civ4 they are just CGI of the wonder being built). There are many other options, though, that fell more like logical extentions of things in the original civ games, such as randomly generated maps that include specific features (such as Ice Age worlds with widespread glaciation, Highland worlds with lots of hills and mountains or "Terra" worlds, that start every Civ on one or two continents, and then have several uninhabited continents that can only be accessed on civs can cross oceans). All in all though, the game plays much more like we all wanted Civ3 to be (that is, Civ 2 with better graphics and including lots of aspects of SMAC), than like Civ 3 actually was (that is, bland and boring). My advice would be to buy it if you liked the first two civs or SMAC. You may not like it as much as either, but that could simply be familiarity; and it's still a great game in any case.

No, Luigi! Luigi was way cooler than Mario, anyway. Plus, he kicked ass in Super Smash Bros.

Dammit, Darkside!

Don't you mean all of the men pretending to be women? "

Ah, but if you remember, the character in Donkey Kong was called Jumpman, not Mario. Thus, if one wanted to be pedantic about it, Mario didn't exist until the first game in which the character was named Mario, and that would be 1985's Super Mario Bros., right?

Well, I've had one game now with a standard map and everything else at its default settings, and I've enountered nothing worse that a quarter-second lag between moves, and the tuly disappointing job Spock has done with the quotes. *sigh* Other than that, Civ IV is awesome! The map situation is one of the most impressive, as in my first game, I didn't discover every civilisation until around 1500AD, mainly because there is so much else to do that I didn't discover Optics (which gives the first ocean-going vessel) until around about that time. The world options look very interesting, though I've not had time to play on the maps they generate, but a desert world filled with oases and a world similar in layout to Earth (large continents with lots of islands, I assume) sound like a lot of fun to play on. Something no one else has mentioned yet (I think) is the addition of an alarm clock into the game, which will not only tell you the time (if you don't have a watch, since you can't see the taskbar's clock in a full screen game) you can set so that the game will inform you when a certain time has passed (if, say, you only wanted to play for two hours), something that I'm sure anyone who ever played Civ until 4AM will find useful. In fact, the only thing other than the voiceovers I can really think of as not liking is the tendancy towards the use of leader names rather than civilisations. In the diplomacy screen, you don't ask Rome to declare war on Germany, you ask Caeser to declare war on Frederick. Perhaps this was done to make the single player feel more like a multiplayer game with the AI as real people, but I personally don't like it. But that's just me nitpicking. This is a great game. A great game. Buy it! Buy it NOW.

My copy will hopefully arrive tomorrow. Please, oh please let it arrive tomorrow!

Are you buy chance, some sort of farmer? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Alas, no. But if there was no physical effort involved, I might be. :cool:

What can I say? It appeals to me. Don't ask me how, but it does.