Huckleberry the Fashion Slave and stubborn non-user of attribute points finally met his nemesis. Up until now, patience and more patience and careful placement of minions has sufficed to prevail.

But this morning, he met his match. He carefully skirted the edges of the Bloody Foothills and the Arreat Plateau seeking the entrance to the Crystalline Passage. (Since he kills so slowly, the point of the expedition was solely to find the Crystalline Passage waypoint before the family woke up.) At the entrance to the the Passage there were three Boss Packs.

He whittled away at the first pack (Snow Drifters - Amp Damage and LEB) but the next two moved in right away and nailed him. Demon Archers and Ghosts. After a stupidly large number of deaths, he gave up and quit the game.

I know that an endless amount of posts have been made on this subject, but none adress my problem. I only have computer access from college, and the drive space available to me there is on a network drive. DoxBOX doesn't work on those, nor does Compatibility mode. I can't use a boot-disk or CD either. Is there any solution that I have overlooked?

EDIT: VDMSound appears to be working, but the screen is exceptionally jumpy. Does anyone have detailed knowledge about VDMSound?

I'd really like to submit an imperium of my own some time, so I'd like to poll people's likes and interests. First off, are you at all interested in a heavily edited imperium that plays much differently from a regular game? If yes:

1) Would you prefer an imperium that starts out at the beginning or one that has already progressed beyond the early stage?

2) Which race would you prefer?

3) Would you prefer standard victory conditions or an elaborate scoring system like the one in IMP4?

4) How about the idea of creating more diversity between planets by fiddling with the three values for max pop? The base max pop can be changed to make soil and gaia more or less efficient, mod max can be changed to further reflect how easy it is to colonize a planet. For example, an ocean planet is easier to settle than a steppe planet (the manual lists steppe planets as filled with rugged terrain that needs to be cleared).

5) How about starting out with a hostile homeworld to reflect an overcrowded and polluted place with inhabitants that are eager for exploration and expansion? Also makes population management a bit more interesting.

6) Would you prefer setting your difficulty level yourself through a variant or would you like two or three different difficulty levels through altered starting ressources of yourself and the opposition?

7) How about altering the wealth of planets to the following:
25% U-poor
40% poor
20% normal
9% rich
3% U-rich
3% artifact
This is intended to make factories a bit less useful, making economy management more challenging and making industrial tech more valuable.

8) Do you like the randomness of free tech from artifact worlds, or would you prefer having them be explored at the start of the game in an effort to curb imbalance? Or would you prefer to have them be located far from the starting locations so that they just don't break the early game?

9) What kind of challenges would you like to see? Ie. underdog struggling to keep peace with powerful neighbours, major power facing powerful enemies, tricky expansion, time pressure to achieve certain objectives, etc.

10) How about eliminating 1/2 or 1/3 of the planets in a large galaxy to create greater distances and make range tech more useful, while not requiring the player to manage a zillion planets?

11) What in-game difficulty level would you prefer? Challenging scenarios can be made on average or hard as well, the main purpose would be to make Orion easier to take.

12) What actual difficulty level would you prefer? Ie. in-game difficulty level combined with the difficulty of the scenario.

Thank you for your time.

On Monday, I went to the doctor's office to have a lump in my arm pit checked out. You know, the old snip and clip biopsy. I have been in a snit for quite some time about it. It is, of course, a valid concern.

So I go in there, and have the nurse holding my arm up, and the doctor numbs me, and the snip happens. And the doctor actually says "what the f***" right there in the office. And I start to freak and I start saying "what the f***" right along with him, because anything that makes a well educated and usually gentle man say that has got to be bad...

So he's saying this and that and cursing, and my arm is really hurting, and he has a nurse bring him some more tools, prongs and clips and stuff, and I can feel panic coming. There was a great deal of pain, and cutting, and snipping, and pulling, and the doctor pulls out this nasty looking chunk of something and plops it into the metal pan. And there is this "PLOINK" sort of sound. And I keep thinking WTF to my self over and over, wondering what the sort of cancer goes "PLOINK" when it gets snipped out.

Doctor carefully scrapes some meaty bits off and says WTF again, this time only a whole lot louder, loud enough that several nurses and a few doctors come in and see what's going on. And I am on the verge of freaking. I am so totally about to loose my mind.

The doctors and nurses are all standing around looking at it and talking quietly and one doctor grabs it in his hand and looks at it, goes over, grabs a bottle of some liquid, and washes it a bit.

He then plunked it down on a metal tray and says "Looks like a 44 slug."

All I can say is, it's awfully nice finally knowing where that damn thing went. That sumbitch never left an exit wound, and mysteriously vanished, oh, I would say, maybe 20 years ago. Reagan was in office when I got that. All those scans and xrays later, and they never did find the little bastard. Even nicer knowing that it's not cancer. I wonder where it was hiding?

What a relief!

Saw a thread over at civfanatics that claimed the default of this variable was changed between PTW and Conquest.
If you put NoAIPatrol=0 in conquests.ini, apparently you regain the behaviour of the PTW barbarians.

Unfortunately this variable doesn't seem to be saved in the save-file, so it would be up to players to decide what to use.

JustUs might be able to clarify more, in case he reads this.

There should be Here
Grimjack

You now have the option of uploading an avatar to use on the forums. Just go to your "User CP" using the links up top, select "edit avatar", and you're ready to go!

At some point I hope to have a chance to upload some avatars for people to choose from, but for now you're on your own. If you have a picture that you like, you're welcome to use it.

Please note that you're limited to 64 X 64, and 15k in file size. Also, please do *not* link to the RB-hosted avatar from other forums (ie- don't upload your avatar here, then use its URL as your avatar on other forums) - we can handle the bandwidth of hosting avatars for our own forums, but I know that some of you also participate on busy forums with many page views, and even a small file can eat up bandwidth if there are lots of people looking at it.

There is a spot for you to put in an avatar's URL if it's already online, but I think it grabs the file from that location and uploads it here. My avatar was on my computer, though, so I haven't tested that yet.

Enjoy! Let me know if you run into any problems with the system.

(Cross posted to Seven Lances forums and Amazon Basin boards.)

The Amazon Basin thread lives here:
http://www.theamazonbasin.com/d2/forums/...opic=50918

The Seven Lances thread lives here:
http://www.sevenlances.com/forum/index.p...=5&t=4023&

I have a post to the RBD ironman rules for D2 classic, I don't know if there exist rules for 1.10, or if we want to work something out that makes sense for the team.

I imagine the group to be a friendly, laid back team whose biggest strength is the way they work together. =)

It's closing day for Epic Forty-four: Denial of the Nile! Please post your reports in reply to this thread.

I made the old Civ forum read-only, put up as big of a "forum closing" notice as I could, and I emailed everyone who was registered over there, so I'm hoping that players will be able to find there way here to report. The links are updated on the main /civ section, too, so that should help.

I think that reports will really help us get a sense of what this forum can and can't (yet) do, so go ahead and try it out! 2:

-Griselda

Home sweet home! Back from a 2 day unplanned road (and ferry) trip down to Victoria. What a beautiful city, wonders that it remains unspoiled since I first visited more than 20 years ago. I thought I'd share some pictures with you, pictures not of its landscape although you can get glimpses of it in the background. These pictures are some of the 60 Orcas that will be auctions off in November. Some of these will be up for bids at the "The Orca Auction & Gala Dinner", and some will be up for online bids. I wish I had known about this "Orcas In The City" event before I went, I would have made more time to hunt down every statue. The hunt itself would have been a very nice tour to the various attractions in the city.





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KoP

Hi all,

Hooray for our shiny new home, and cheers to Lurker Lounge for their help!

Griselda, two minor things, *way* down your list of things to do. I am impressed that you are making the effort to convert postings across.

My password went away in the changeover from the Lurker Lounge, it could well be that that was the most sensible way to handle things (ie, there was no way for you to conserve current passwords, you had to force a password reset). From my point of view I *used* to have exactly the same username and password on both LL and Realms Beyond, but it went away?

The current time quoted appears to be 11 hours ahead (or maybe 13 hours behind) what it should be. This is after I set my correct local timezone (NZ daylight time, GMT+13, and doesn't THAT exercise a few bugs).

Now I just need to amend my Imperium 7 report a bit for vB code...

Cheers,
Factoid.

PS - I can't tell from one post what day it is! My message was posted Thursday 14th October at 10:32(-ish) GMT+13, and comes out as "posted today at 21:32 GMT +13", so I have to wait a couple of days to get a full date stamp on the posting.

I care about getting the clock right because having a wrong clock timestamping postings (or touching anything system- or database-related) is really icky. If the clock needs to be set forward 13 hours that is not too bad, but setting a clock back 11 hours and having overlapping timestamps for those 11 hours is just nasty. I hope I'm wrong about all of this.

PPS - The clock is (hopefully only) seven minutes out, and the timezone settings in either vBulletin or at system level are wrong/bugged/broken. If it is a *nix box I would suggest "man timezone" and "man ntpd" or "man timed" if you must. I also suggest you get local expertise, don't rely on random postings from people you don't know.