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Post by Mr Bismarck's Electric Donkey on Jan 12, 2009 16:16:57 GMT
We haven't seen Meej around here for a while, so I thought I'd put together a concerted effort to get him back by writing about a game of Civ. Of course, in itself, that probably wouldn't be enough to get him back so I went several steps further :
1. It's not Civ II, it's Civ IV. 2. It's not Civ IV, it's the "Beyond the Sword" expansion pack. 3. It's not Civ IV BtS, it's a player-made mod for Civ IV BtS called Fall From Heaven. 2. 4. Where necessary, I paid for the software, with real money.
I frequent another forum™ which has a good core of pc gamers who like independent offerings, (small house and independent in exactly the way Civ isn't), and one of the guys there is the lead on this mod, which is based loosely around a D&D game the guy has GMd for about 11 years.
As you'd expect from 11 years of D20 rolling, there's a lot of backstory and mythology involved and I'll recap that a little bit in the next post, so that you know what the fork is going on. Or at least to the level that I do, which is not at all.
So to recap, it's Civ, it's better than not Civ 2, I used real money and then it's all bastardised by some nerds who probably live in their mum's basement still.
[/summon meej]
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Post by Mr Bismarck's Electric Donkey on Jan 12, 2009 16:17:46 GMT
In an attempt to do some justice to how secretly impressed I am with the FFH mod I'm going to try to remain relatively straight faced while describing the back story. With a lot of games with fantasy mythology that means a ton of unintentional humour is on the horizon, but the quality of FFH means that the laughter will probably be replaced by an overly earnest tone instead.
Just imagine it being read by someone with thick specs wearing a t-shirt with two dice on it showing double 20s and the slogan "Dat's how I roll" or "They see me rollin', they hatin'."
In the beginning there was God and he created everything. Or rather he created the space in which everything would eventually end up. This was quite tiring though and at this point God shows the work habits of a Divot, (I did say relatively straight faced), because he decides he can't be bothered with this mularkey any more and instead he creates a number of Angels and gives them the power to create and says "get on with it"and then goes back to surfing, well, nothing, because nothing has been created yet. Maybe he has a kip, I don't know.
There were 21 angels, which seems a lot to me, but each was given a unique trait and the power to create. For example, Bhaal, was the Angel of Fire, with fire considered a force for good for its cleansing properties. Sirona was the Angel of Wisdom and Arawn was the Angel of punching anyone who starting humminh that song by The Knack and changed the words to Ma-Ma-Ma-Myyyyyyy Sirona.
The Angels worked at the speed of Fruits, staring at God's creation of heaven for centuries before becoming inspired to head out and do their own thing and start creating the Crab Nebula, Betelgeuse, Earth, Badgers, Belgians, fridge magnets and Robert Pires' tiny beard.
After a few Brazilian centuries of creation, God decided He should have a look at what was up and generally liked what He saw, (Pires' beard aside), and so, like all good project managers, He decided to claim all of the good work as his own while generally giving the shaft to His project team. After cliaming all the glory, His big announcement was that He was going to be removing the power to create from his Angels who would now be expected to spend eternity sitting about, watching their creations enjoy their new gift of free will.
At kindergarten there's always one kid who won't put the crayons back when he's told and apparently Angels are no different from four year olds. The trouble maker in this instance was Agares, the Angel of Hope. Agares' creations has been generally considered to be the best of all, but hope is a dangerous gift for anyone and he enjoyed his creation so much that he hoped to eventually become more than an angel and a creator by proxy. So when he heard that his powers were to be neutered, he began to take the creative mana he had been imbued with and hide it in almost bottomless caches around all of his creations. This meant that when the Angels were stripped of their power to create, he could continue, charging up in his pools of hidden mana and then creating sporks, spiders and Spaniards.
There was a slight flaw in his plan though, in that he was trying to deceive an omnipresent being. One day, while Agares was working on spuds, (before moving on to things starting with "Sq"), the Big G showed with a bit of a face on and reprimanded him. Agares was unapologetic and so the Big G corrupted Agares' hands, turning them to ash so that anything he touched to try to create from that point would turn to cinders and blow away.
God then went home and slammed the door shut behind him so that no more magic could spill from Heaven to creation, leaving Agares without his tea to think about what he'd done.
Of course, that probably wasn't the best idea either as Agares had found six other angels who weren't chuffed about losing their powers to side with him, while seven angels thought he was a very naughty boy and, very neatly, seven angels tried to step between the two factions, shouting "alright, alright, ease down, have a word with yourselves."
For humanity, such as it was at the time, this was known as the Age of Dragons, as the war raging above their heads tore the Earth apart, making continents clash, mountains and volcanos rise and flooding large areas with lava.
Each of the 21 angels rallied armies of lesser angels in their image and the wars raged on for eons before finally the majority realised the futility of it all and, desperate to not do any more damage to the precious creation that they wouldn't be able to repair, they signed the Gods Compact, (with the God out of the way, the lesser beings had started referring to the Angels as Gods), which asserted that they should stop fighting directly and instead should raise civilisations to fight for them through war, culture of whatever means they felt necessary.
In an act of foreshadowing, each "God" in turn stepped forward and put their hand on a single, newly forged, sword and spoke their own name, which added an inscription to the blade of this new "Godlsayer" which could be used should any of them get out of line.
This tenuous peace lead to the Age of Magic, as the collections of men and tribes on Earth were raised up by their respective Gods and taught how to look after themselves again, build civilisations, tie their shoes and bend the large amount of mana Agares left about the place to their own benefit.
Any age of relative peace was always bound to end in a nasty fashion though, and so it did as Agares, missing for many millenia, was shown to be still around as he had been whispering to Bhaal, Goddess of Fire for centuries, reminding her of how God's was the only pure creation and that their own efforts were not only inferior, but pointless to defend because they were meaningless compared to His and pointless now no one had the power to create.
Given enough time, (and as Gods they had plenty of that), Agares finally depressed Bhaal enough that she had a bit of an emo fit and she "fell" unbalancing the sides in favour of the bad people. Bhaal quite literally fell to Earth, smashing through the Bannor capital of Braduk and forming the second layer of hell; the Land of Flame which sat alongside Agares' Wasteland.
The fall of Bhaal had grave consequences as Mulcarn, Angel of Ice was now unopposed. One of the original six to fall, Mulcarn had transformed from the Angel of Ice to the God of Winter and without Bhaal's fire to counterbalance him the Earth now fell into a long ice age.
This had particularly bad consequences for the Elven race of Earth, as they shared their leadership between two families, one of whom ruled through spring and summer, the other through Autumn and Winter. With the Earth now in permanent winter the Elven ice queen refused to give up her throne prompting a civil war that would last centuries, dragging most of the other races in onto one side or other.
Eventually, the perpetual cold and the endless infighting shattered most of the races of Earth. Once grand civilisations broke down into small nomadic groups who wandered the surface in search of food and some warmth wherever it might be found.
Blah, blah, blah, sometime later the holy warriors of the Bannor who had been consigned to hell when Bhaal fell right through their city finally fought their way back to the land of the living bringing with them a shard of the Godslayer that had Mulcarn's name on it. Kylorin, the former king of the Patrias - the most powerful of the human civilisations - formed together a band of the broken tribes of man, called them the Amurites and went to battle alongisde the Bannor, finally thrusting the shard of Godslayer into the God Mulcarn and, err, slaying him.
Godslayer, it does exactly what it says on the tin!
With Mulcarn's death the ice begins to melt and we enter the Age of Rebirth, which is where we are now. What's left of the great tribes of Earth are tiny fractions of before with no home and little of their previous knowledge.
I hope you were paying attention. There will be a test.
------------------------------------------------------------
So this is where we finally come in. I have chosen to take over the Amurites because they're pretty much the exact opposition of the type of Civ I'd normally take. They're not robust defenders, preferring instead to reach out with culture and religion and use magic to convert of repel foes. I won't be able to build massive defensive lines along my borders and build behind them, nor build a materiel advantage and then smash my enemies to tiny bits.
I might even have to try diplomacy, which means not calling other civilisations naughty names, which will be a challenge.
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Post by coffers on Jan 12, 2009 17:04:19 GMT
This might be interesting. Does it involve GloF?
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Post by Mr Bismarck's Electric Donkey on Jan 12, 2009 17:46:19 GMT
Yes. Lots of it.
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Post by Mr Bismarck's Electric Donkey on Jan 12, 2009 17:55:20 GMT
So here we are in the land that I like to call "Starting Location." In olde days you could scroll the map miles and miles into the dark "fogged" area until you hit the real walls which would let you know roughly where you were, geographically, even though you couldn't see anything, but in these modern times you can only scroll so far into the black, so I don't know if I'm further north than Moo, further south than elth or off the coast of Africa, with Pops. The good thing about Starting Location is that it has two tribal villages and an ancient graveyard right there in front of me, just waiting to be pillaged, exploited, explored, which will give me free stuff. Free stuff is good right now, as my merry band consists of one settler capable of founding a settlement, one scout, capable of running around quite quickly into something dangerous and then dying and one warrior, capable of running around very slowly into something dangerous and then dying. Which is nice. Up later... The Episode Where I Reach Turn Four and Find Out I've Already Annoyed Someone.
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Post by Mr Bismarck's Electric Donkey on Jan 12, 2009 19:19:02 GMT
So the most important thing to get done right now is to put down the foundations for future home of the Glorious Amurite Super Hegemony (GASH) and after just a short bit of wandering a likely site presents itself. It's a bulge of flat land with land that narrows to the west and the sea to the other three sides, meaning it should be defensible. A very narrow land bridge runs to the northwest, but my scouting suggests large ice floes to the north, so we could be at the pole here. The settles put down their tents and tools and mark out the first plot of what will one day becoming the great Amurite capital, the city of Cervedes. While our settlers were busy the scout and warriors weren't slacking, as they introduced themselves to the nearby tribal villagers. The first gave us a great pagan statue to their god made purely of gold. Normally we would have placed such a cultural icon on display in a museum or civic building, but we encountered two main issues with that plan; firstly we didn't have any museums or civic buildings and secondly we'd already melted the statue down to make gold coins before I could do anything, so I concentrated on just enjoying the 530 gold coins we now had in our treasury. The second tribal village had a lot to live up to after that and they didn't disappoint. Ok, actually they did disappoint, so we took a couple of their men, give them shovels and told them to start making roads or we'd melt them down to make coins too. Sticky, fleshy coins. The ancient graveyard that was revealed by the thaw was a bit scarier than the villages, so we sent our warrior in there. They emerged a week later and their leader was somewhat shifty when I asked what he'd found, saying simply "nothing" despite the fact that he was covered in blood and seemed to be wearing someone's face for a hat. Clearly something odd had happened, because he had a very clear nervous facial tick now, which made the sack of skin on his head jiggle. But my biggest clue was that his men had gone from calling him "Galak" to calling him "Galak the Crazed." I sent him to guard some trees, as far away from Cervedes as possible. A week after that he emerged from the trees, carrying what appeared to be a sack of twigs, but turned out to be some scrawny prophet of some sort. Galak the Crazed claimed he'd "found" him and asked repeatedly "can we keep him? Can we can we can we?" I took the prophet back into Cervedes for his own safety. Then gave him a spear and told him to stand guard, as we didn't have any other people to act as a garrision, what with Galak being a couple of angels short of a mythology and my scouts being, err, dead. Well that's nice. I barely had chance to lament the dsiscovery of a large pack of Frostling Wolves using my scouts as toothpicks when an emmissary for this lass showed up. I looked around town and saw some bread and a goat. Given enough time I could probably make her the Celts' national dish of cheese on toast, but that didn't seem enough to declare war over, really. Although cheese on toast is very nice. Next Episode : Galak the Crazed gets a teensy bit carried away...
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Post by Moo on Jan 13, 2009 9:03:44 GMT
"So this is where we finally come in. I have chosen to take over the Amurites because they're pretty much the exact opposition of the type of Civ I'd normally take. They're not robust defenders, preferring instead to reach out with culture and religion and use magic to convert of repel foes. I won't be able to build massive defensive lines along my borders and build behind them, nor build a materiel advantage and then smash my enemies to tiny bits.
I might even have to try diplomacy, which means not calling other civilisations naughty names, which will be a challenge. "
So basically, you're in charge of a bunch of poofy (presumably) Southerners who would rather knit your way out of trouble than anything else.
"Don't kill me! Have a scarf!"
KUTGW! :thumb:
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Post by Moo on Jan 13, 2009 9:21:51 GMT
So you've annoyed Dorothee Perkeen, Queen of Chaavaa then? Look out! She'll throw a scrunchee at you!
KUTGW!
Again.
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Post by Narcizo on Jan 13, 2009 9:37:26 GMT
When's the test then?
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Post by Mr Bismarck's Electric Donkey on Jan 13, 2009 12:25:15 GMT
So you've annoyed Dorothee Perkeen, Queen of Chaavaa then? Look out! She'll throw a scrunchee at you! KUTGW! Again. The Clan of Embers is described as cursed and enraged as they were transformed into Orcs. Which does sound a lot like Basildon.
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Post by Moo on Jan 13, 2009 12:41:26 GMT
I'm really enjoying this thread, BTW.
When do you buy your next game, thus abandoning this one? Thursday?
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Post by coffers on Jan 13, 2009 12:46:27 GMT
probably.
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Post by Sonic on Jan 13, 2009 13:39:16 GMT
Sounds like She's a woman spurned. Did you forget to send her flowers or something?
That history sounds like it should be written into a book. Looks interesting.
Though Moo is probably right, and we won't find out the next installment.
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Post by Mr Bismarck's Electric Donkey on Jan 13, 2009 15:42:56 GMT
My other threads are not dead, they're just resting. After all, there was a year long gap in the St Albans thread and it reappeared like an angry Baldwin.
When's the next installment of your basketball thread, Moo?
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Post by Moo on Jan 13, 2009 16:16:38 GMT
It's scheduled for the week after your Octopus Overlords update.
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Post by Mr Bismarck's Electric Donkey on Jan 13, 2009 16:30:58 GMT
I finished that game. There's a post on the thread saying so.
It's almost like you weren't paying attention.
Although that would explain why Locky McLockerton didn't lock it yet.
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Post by coffers on Jan 13, 2009 17:18:11 GMT
So what Moo is saying is that his thread should be closed too? He's given up on hoop ball?
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Post by Moo on Jan 14, 2009 9:03:42 GMT
I hadn't given up on it, but I could close it, aye. I was probably going to move colleges as I felt so upset after Vernard Benoit left.
Mind you, as my PC time is (and will be) limited for the next few weeks, I have to decide on:
1. Poker 2. FM 06 save with Newcastle 3. FM 06 save with Mosonmagyarovar. 4. the Hoops game 5. FOF and Seattle
Too much to decide upon.
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Post by coffers on Jan 14, 2009 11:20:08 GMT
Ignore that lot and take up GloF.
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Post by Moo on Jan 14, 2009 11:24:36 GMT
Go on then, Coffs. Send me the link.
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Post by hornet on Jan 14, 2009 12:00:28 GMT
Sirona was the Angel of Wisdom and Arawn was the Angel of punching anyone who starting humminh that song by The Knack and changed the words to Ma-Ma-Ma-Myyyyyyy Sirona. When my middle son first heard that song, he thought that the lyrics went: "Oooh my little pretty one, my pretty one When you gonna give me some Times New Roman?"As you can imagine, we have in no way sung that version every single time it comes up in Rock Band.
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Post by Moo on Jan 14, 2009 12:07:09 GMT
Awesome.
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Post by Sonic on Jan 14, 2009 12:39:25 GMT
I have a good memory of that song at a pub, with lots of drinks, and a particular cute girl. Top night that.
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Post by Boony on Jan 14, 2009 13:00:15 GMT
Sirona was the Angel of Wisdom and Arawn was the Angel of punching anyone who starting humminh that song by The Knack and changed the words to Ma-Ma-Ma-Myyyyyyy Sirona. When my middle son first heard that song, he thought that the lyrics went: "Oooh my little pretty one, my pretty one When you gonna give me some Times New Roman?"As you can imagine, we have in no way sung that version every single time it comes up in Rock Band. Not only are you a geek, but you are breeding geeks. Top work, carry on...
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Post by DC on Jan 14, 2009 13:39:44 GMT
Sirona was the Angel of Wisdom and Arawn was the Angel of punching anyone who starting humminh that song by The Knack and changed the words to Ma-Ma-Ma-Myyyyyyy Sirona. When my middle son first heard that song, he thought that the lyrics went: "Oooh my little pretty one, my pretty one When you gonna give me some Times New Roman?"As you can imagine, we have in no way sung that version every single time it comes up in Rock Band. For the record, my gran walked into my Dads room about 35 years ago and said "What's he on about? Why's he singing about his sewing machine?". Listening to Hawkwind has never been the same since.
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