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Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Lets start a new game of Skyrim - Talking With Gods






So does everyone remember Barbas? Yeah, thank good he is no longer following me around. Anyone that has done the quest line knows that Barbas here is the pet of a god (the God of Annoying the Hell out of You!). Anyhow, the way you get this quest is a blacksmith ask you to find this dog that has been wandering around town. Well it is Barbas, and well the blacksmith cannot have him (that I know of at least) and you can go tell him that Barbas is more trouble than he is worth at which the blacksmith goes about his business. Well Barbas and his master are both more trouble than they are worth. I finally completed the quest and "Hoorah For F#^@ing Silence!" seriously, I love dogs but Barbas would not shut the hell up. There are some advantages to having Barbas in your party and not completing the quest, mostly because he is an Unkillable NPC. But after several days of playing with him in my party I finally got tired of his constant barking and completed the quest. No I couldn't go through with what his master wanted and gave up the axe (I didn't need it anyhow) but I must say the silence is a great thing. Now I can even hear the Dragons scream as they come in to attack me.


Is it just me or all the Gods in Skyrim just wrong in the head. I found a gem to Meridia (ok so it was her Beacon) and she commanded me to return it. Not ask, DEMANDED! So I put the beacon in my bag and went to Whiterun and threw it in my chest. Where it sat until I started to build my house in Falkreath at which I accidentally moved it with my crafting supplies. When I went to deal with Barbas I realized that quest was way out in the same area so I took it along. So I stopped by her shrine and replaced the beacon at which point she lifts me a very long way into the air and demands that I clean out her temple of some necromancer (she really hates this necromancer) all the while complaining about the fickleness of mortals (Well maybe if you weren't a demanding ......) yeah I held my tongue seeing that if she dropped me there wouldn't be much left. So i cleaned her house and low and behold she thanked me and then demanded I go forth and cleanse the world of the undead and spread her word. No thank you, I took the sword and will soon forget her name.


Of the Gods that I have actually had the opportunity to speak only one thus far hasn't been a total pain. I met Hircine after obtaining his cursed ring and in order to talk with him about removing the curse had to go shoot kill his avatar, a White Stag. He was pretty cool about it and all. He simply told me that I would have to go skin the werewolf that stole his ring and that if i did so he would grant me his boon and remove the curse. So I went and skinned the werewolf at which point he turned the skin into armor. That kind of creeped me out but thus far it was the least offensive encounter with a god i have had thus far.


Lets start a new game of Skyrim - Part 3


This is Hert, I buy lumber from her and she is a vampire. What does this have to do with my story? Well in the course of my travels I encountered a dungeon full of vampires, not friendly ones like Hert of course, and they bit me or what ever it is they have to do to infect you. In fact, I didn't even know I was infected until several days after the run in which everything went white and I receive a message about my blood boiling or some such. Ok so i did not want to be a vampire, I don't want to drink blood, and i don't want to catch fire in sunlight. I have enough problems with Dragons that i don't need guards trying to stab me for my glowing eyes. I had to do something about this and so I did. Go talk to a tavern owner, ask for rumors, track down some guy that knows about vampires, steal the soul of the living, and get cured. Yeah I did feel bad about the soul thing so I took it from an Imperial Soldier. Yeah i am a Stormcloak! Happy Dance! One dead Imperial Soldier and I am Vampire Free.

Now don't worry I decided not to start out this part of my story with more Dragons but I will be mentioning Dragons soon enough. Firstly though I think I should give a quick explanation about these vampires. See I downloaded a Quest mod called Helgen Reborn and one of the Quest givers wanted to get rid of some vampires. I figured hell how many can there be, you only ever see 4 or 5 attack a town. Yeah never think like that. 30 Vampires and 3 days later and I have the first signs of Vampirism. Should have knew there was something wrong when the guy told me not to get to close. Anyhow, I appear to have moved the quest line along pretty well and thus far I am glad that I grabbed it.

I have also been working on the Stormcloak quest line. I had a chance to take Whiterun and now the NPCs are less annoying since they aren't spouting Imperial rubbish at me all the time. I am currently not sure where the quest line is taking me since all I seem to be doing now is going from camp to camp doing odd jobs. It got to the point where I had to take a break. So i built a house. Yeah I had already bought the plot from Falkreath so all I had to do was go take a look. Lets just say that for about an hour of so of relaxation I built the entry way, main house, and the rear wing house. I also became friends with Hert, and learned all sorts of things about stone and clay. The only furnishings that I was able to build was a bed and then it was mostly so that I could sleep in order to wait for Hert to wake up so I could buy more Lumber. The only real thing of interest is that right out my east window and down the hill is a Necromancer making art with Skeletons. Yeah, I have weird neighbors and I may have to look her up and find out what the hell is going on with her because after talking with her for about 10 minutes I still hadn't gotten anywhere with her and I didn't just want to up and kill her.

Now for the dragons of which I ran into four of them. One I wish i had waited to kill because I hadn't realized at the time that he was very intend upon killing some Thalmor of which I am getting tired of. Every time I see an elf now a days they all seem to be Thalmor and if you thought the Imperials spouted off some rubbish then wait to you meet these guys. I literally killed one of these guys and he was still talking. I don't know if it was a scripting glitch or what but after about 2 minutes he finally stop his babbling.The second dragon wasn't so much a problem, it attacked me on the side of the mountain and I slaughtered it. The third and fourth dragons were where it got weird though. I fast traveled to Falkreath and like usual there was a dragon in town. So I killed it and went to talk to the Jarl. When I left the Jarl's Hall I ran into 5 vampires. Come On Really! Well after dealing with them I went into the tavern and sold a couple of items. When I walked out of the Tavern, yeah you got it, another dragon.


This appears to be the story of my life. I wonder if I will stop seeing so many of these guys if I get back on the dragonborn quest line?







Monday, May 19, 2014

Civilization 5 - LAN


A Typical Friday night for the last couple of months has seen my gaming group mostly play Warhammer 40k and soon some Iron Kingdoms, but this past Friday we played Civ5. We played with 3 teams of 4 and of course we were all on the same team. I ran a random leader and received Maria the 1st of Portugal. With Maria i typically look for a lot of trade in the early game and then buy a Diplomatic Victory in the end. This wasn't going to be the case this game though. We ended the game at Turn 199 with a world at total war. The game is saved in case we get a chance to go back and finish it. Hopefully we will. Next comes a brief description of time Friday in Civ5.

George (Bismark) and myself started off within about 20 hexes of each other in the far south of our Huge Continents map. Scott (Napoleon) started in the dead center and Austin (Gajah Mada) started in the far north. For the first 20 -30 turns all was quite and while we ran into some scouts on our little continent (George and myself) nothing really happened until I built my second city. Oh Hello Mister Genghis Khan! Yeah there he was not 2 hexes north of my new city which is almost never a good sign. So i had a dialog with the man and all was good. No hostility, open to trade, and 3 turns later he appeared as Friendly. Go me for not pissing that warmonger off. Given another couple of turns all this would change. George and myself had to stop and have a think though, see we had a plan to connect our nations and work towards a yet undetermined goal (really though who knows what they are going to do in the first 50 turns). We were going to have to build at least a small military due to the barbarians harassing us both from the South.
 

So their I was building a small military (more to keep GK thinking then dealing with the barbarians) and trying to get some money coming in when all of a sudden Catherine the Great builds a city the minimum number of hexes from me. Damn it not again! So lets go talk to her, well apparently Maria did something very bad to her in the past because she was down right hostile to me. If I had sent a messenger to her I would have had his head returned in a box. Thankfully we had already discovered iron! OK so who can give me Iron for Dyes? 4 Iron for my dyes, sure i will take it. 5 turns later I have enough of an army to take out the Russian village on my border but I need catapults and we were still a couple of turns out so I figured I would see who else didn't like Catherine besides me. So I take a look and nobody hates her..... Denounce Catherine, wait 2 turns. Hey my buddy GK denouced her too. "So GK, you want to go attack Russia in Winter with me?" "To WAR!" he says and the First World War begins.

My Buddy GK

See when i asked this question of GK, I didn't really expect him to say yes. In the 700+ hours playing Civ5 I have NEVER had another Civ EVER say yes to going to war with me. So when it happened and all my buddies were going "What the Hell" I was stunned and then found it extremely funny.


The entirety of WWI, went like this. My army of Swordsmen and Catapults along with George's Single Archer (who I must say was an amazing help for no other reason than granting LoS for my Catapults) walked over Catherine's City and then the next one and after a 2 turn rest and consolidation period Moscow. So we took out Catherine's Capital but she still had St. Petersburg and since Catherine was still being a pain it too would fall in the next 10 turns. So after about 20 turns of combat the annoyance that was Catherine is now gone and everyone on entirety of the map except for GK hated me for being a Warmonger. GK was still friends with me. Unfortunately, it wouldn't always be that way.

Soon after the destruction of Catherine, we entered a time of peace (mostly because everyone was probably scared of me - I think George was and he was on my team). I was in serious need of playing catchup due to my mass militarization. So we all settled back into the early game run for resources (mine being money, I was netting -48 gold a turn at this point). This went on for a long time and I got caught up, we had trade, Austin had mass barbarian problems, Scott took a nap since Shaka never even came by to have tea with him, and George and I completed the road from Munich to St Petersburg (50 to 100 Hexes long). And then stuff started to get interesting again. It started with a jump of about 100 points for Nebuchadnezzar, and GK and Caesar going to war with some local City-States. Now this wouldn't normally bother me but Neb was on Catherine's Team along with Ashurbanipal, both of which are only about 12 hexes to my North West. Also GK and Caesar started amassing a very large number of troops on my northern border. Now GK is still a firend of mine but Caesar was not and while they are on the same team all it would take is a denouncement to put GK at war with me. So began the build up to WWII.

I start making a technology run for Muskets and Cannons. Since I already had long swordsmen and Catapults (which were already being upgraded to Trebs) the cost to get these to Muskets and Cannons would be light. This is also when a decision I made very early in the game was going to come in handy.


I told George of my plan to deal with GK and Caesar at some point and Austin decided he wanted to expand south and take Theadora. Our only problem is that I still needed time to get some cannons. I saw more and more Pikemen on my northern borders, Austin was waiting on ships, I was waiting on Cannons, and George was sipping Tea while waiting for both of us. Scott was simply enjoying the quiet of his little continent. Other than some barbarians, Scott hadn't seen a single combat all game. Shaka who shared the same lands left Scott alone this entire time.

All of a sudden everything happened at once, WWII started with the sound of cannons being fired from the waters off the coast of Theadora's Capital. This would become a long and bloody battle (Seriously, it took way to long for Austin to take the city). It took so long that i don't even remember if he even took the city. I think he did but in truth I was busy. For the next 20 or so turns I marched my armies north into Mongolian and then Roman territory conquering everything in my path. The plan was actually pretty sound. I moved up and engaged two of GK's cities while George blitzed his Capital. So in about 8 turns GK was out of the pictures and I walked away with 2 cities while George walked away with 1. We then split Caesar's Cities in half George taking the more southern 2 and myself taking the northern 2 which included Rome. By this point Caesar didn't really have an army left as I had destroyed it while it tried to help GK defend his lands. The high defense of the cities did slow us down a little bit though.


While all this was going on, Scott decided that he wanted in on the fun and began a war against Shaka. While I believe Scott had a technologically superior army, Shake had the numbers. I believe that by the time of Turn 199 the great French Zulu war was at a stalemate. As for the rest of WWII, both GK and Caesar was conquered. We left the battle at that point, still at war and awaiting our return. Neb had gained a good number of points during the war and since he didn't participate in it didn't lose anything. My Diplomat in his capital had nothing to say to me and no information on troops and only a small bit on information of the city defenses (32 defense, Rome was int he low to mid 20s).

I believe when we get back to it I will probably go about ending the war. Then will begin another era of technological growth as both George and myself need to consolidate the 4 to 6 cities we gained and get troops back into position. In truth I should have let George take Rome as well so that we both had a city exposed to the next war front. As it is, I think i have 6 cities now facing Neb and his partner all of which I need to build up defenses in and move troops too. I do believe a 3rd World War will happen sooner rather than later though i do not know if I will initiated it or Neb. We will just have to wait and see.

Turn 199... Next Turn!

Download Update - IKRP_CCS.xltx

Nothing major today other than I added some visual formatting in order to make reading the document easier.

IKRPG_CCS.xltx

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Lets start a new game of Skyrim - Part 2


Since i last posted I have seen way to many of these, in fact I was attacked by three of these all with in a 15 minute span. Sure mister mage guys I will go to some cave on a mountain to find a staff that will save the world. What do I get in my travels to said cave? Attacked by a Dragon, and then another Dragon, and when I get into the cave? Yep another dragon but for a change this one was already dead. It might have well been alive because all the anti-undead magic in the world didn't do a thing to it. So lesson learned, Bone Dragons do not equal undead dragon even if they look the part. 

I also got pulled into the Descent into Madness quest line way to early in my career. This is a quest mod and it is activated when you go to sleep in your bed within Breezeholme. Well i have two things to say about this. Firstly, level 10 is not a good level to be going into this quest, I spent good amounts of time running away from things that I had no business even attempting to fight. Secondly, I never went to sleep in Breezeholme. Yeah the quest triggered when I was attempting to put something in the chest next to the bed. 

If you haven't had the opportunity to play Descent into Madness by all means play it. It is a pretty good quest line and I enjoyed every part of it other than the running for the hills from stuff I couldn't really kill. I  entered the quest without my companion (and after looking at a video because i got stuck) I realized that I probably should have had my companion with me. Not entirely sure but the guy in the video had his companion. I didn't.


Other than the lack of companion and to tell the truth i am not sure you are supposed to have a companion on this quest I only really had one glitch. Since I went with Madness I had to follow Nimbly the Split Personality Girl through parts of the quest. Well I must of thumbed her in the back of the head with a fireball one to many times because by the time we got to Dementia she wanted to kill me as much as everyone else. And she could 3 shot me while screaming "For the Eye of Thundera!". Ok, so that did get a bit annoying. I did have to learn a console command to fix her and since she had killed 3/4 of the village while chasing me I also had to resurrect the objective of the quest as well. 

Now I did survive and I did walk away from the quest with a couple pieces of armor. I also promptly saves, exited the game and turned off the mod until I can gain a couple more levels. Once I feel ready I will go back in there and play the Dementia side of the quest. 

So that was the excitement since I last posted about Skyrim. Dragons and Crazy people have ruled most of my time in game. I leave off with a quest were I am following a talking dog up a mountain to a cave with a bad name. If it is interesting I guess you will be hearing about it.


"My master kicked me out! Please help!"


Who can say no to a face like that? I think I am going to wish I did.

Project Safari Car - Complete!

Take two weekends, two projects, and a 7 year old girl and you will get something like this. Yes this is a blue and pink safari car with a leopard print hood and zebra stripe seat covers. Other than design, some fabrication, and use of spray paint, my daughter did all the work which includes the gluing of the popsicle sticks together in order to make the bench seating. Her mother cut out the fabric for the roof and the squiggly paper for the running boards but I believe we made her do almost everything else. Yes she even hand painted the hub caps. Since we put so much work into this thing I figured I would share the finished project.



Not sure what she was trying to draw on the sides but the car was a little blank without it.


Double headlights for the win!



So apparently there are two Mickey Mouse guards on the back and a Leopard print mud flap. Go figure.


Once again the funny line to break up the blank sides. I just wonder if she realized that the lines don't go to the same place on both sides. XD


Friday, May 9, 2014

Lets start a new game of Skyrim


Yeah I am starting over in Skyrim. Why, because I got my self into a situation of oh crap, bad quest, and game bugs... So it has been about 3 months since that bad experience and the unofficial skyrim patch states that my particular bugs have been fixed except not the save is broke all the way back to about 6 hours from were I was. Yeah I am not doing that again so retired my rogue lizard guy is and born my Breton wizard lady is.

Now I did get all the unofficial patches since they have to be better than the official patches and I grabbed a couple of other mods such as the one that actually lets you see while underwater (go figure - you may actually have a quest that requires you to find a very very small object under water). I also picked up a couple of mod that make things look less like minecraft.

20 minutes later I get through the intro which I had to back out of once because I didn't start in the cart. We were all just hanging around next to the cart and watching the horse that was suppose to pull the cart try and push it and fail. once I get that all straightened out and we get to town, character created, and head on the chopping block/dragon attack I realize while running away trying to keep my butt from being caught on fire that I was actually given a decision! yeah I guess I wasn't actually paying that much attention the first time. So I get to choose whether I want to go with the Imperial guy that just wanted to remove my head from my shoulders or mister "Hello my name is Ralof and we are all going to die" but was at least happy about it. Good Ralof it is! Down with the Imperial Scum! Yeah I paid a more attention to the game this time. I think Rugby might have been on the last time I ran through the intro.

Yeah here he is Ralof my Savior

Now I realize that this was a Matrix moment and after you take the pill you are basically in the same place, leaving the same hole in the mountain. I think I have been here before??? Yeah and then Ralof jumps behind the rock and says something about it being gone. What? The Dragon? Yeah it is, I cannot even see it anymore. Then he sends me on my way to Riverwood or some such. Ok this is all familiar now, walk down the mountain while looking through the spells I have. Ooooo sparkly ghost puppy! I like that. Puppy runs off and three seconds later I am getting attacked by wolves. Hmmm maybe the ghost puppy has a large aggro range (it does!).

So I am walking towards Riverwood and hear a dragon (that would be the very rare and elusive dragons in Skyrim) and think nothing of it..... wait there wasn't a dragon attacking Riverwood last time....was there. Yes right out of the intro and there is a dragon lighting the village dog on fire, trampling the tulips, and eating the chickens less than 10 minutes after leaving the hole in the mountain. I had to stop and make sure i didn't get a mod for extra dragons..... no I didn't get any mods for extra dragons. So I stop and look at my map and think that maybe Falkreath might be a better location to hit level 2 at and since I grabbed the Halgren Reborn mod I could at least hide from this dragon for a bit.

As I mentioned the Ghost Puppy has a large aggro range. Firstly, the Ghost Puppy is the Familiar from the Conjure Familiar spell. Secondly, The thing looks like a wolf. Thirdly, I don't think it liked me to much. You know the range that you would normally pull out a bow in order to hunt an Elk in Skyrim? Well for me it is at the range were you have to aim a bit above where you want to hit so that the arrow fall into the Elks neck. Well that is about the distance that the Ghost Puppy would charge a pack of wolves and then while he was eating the one wolf he attacked and other two or three would come and try and eat me. This happened about 4 times heading to Falkreath. Makes me glad I didn't have him summoned when I got to Riverwood or he may have attacked the Dragon.


Here is my good Ghost Puppy


If he wasn't already dead I think I may have to kill him.

I stopped play as I entered town. Not a bug or glitch in site. The Ghost Puppy didn't run off to attack a city guard or anything and no one was yelling at me for being me. I am concerned for this play through seeing as the very first town i came to was under a dragon attack and all the times I had past though there on my last play though not once did I see a dragon attack that village.



Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Civilization Beyond Earth - Announcement Video


Well I just watched the announcement video and I am very happy with what I saw and heard. If you haven't seen it then here you go.


Civilization Beyond Earth



If you don't know this, I am a huge Civilization fan. I have played Civ 1, 2, 3, 5, Revolutions and Alpha Centari (and while I haven't played Civ 4 I do own a copy). So when I heard about Beyond Earth I was instantly hooked and have pushed all other games for the year down the list. This to me is a must have, pre-order, take the release day off from work and growl at anyone who attempts to distract me.

With this said I will be having a bit to say about the game as more information is released. So for anyone who may be interested here are a couple of Q&A videos from after the announcement. Thus far this is all I have seen but I know there are a couple other sources that have stuff up so I apologize if this stuff is out of order. I am pretty sure that someone actually has a video of the announcement I just haven't seen it yet.





What I did last weekend


So I mentioned (or was it complained) that I spent most of the weekend with my daughter working on a Safari Jeep. Well here it is. Yeah it took most of a day to make a template so my daughter could cut out the doors, cut the dowels for the wheels and roof supports, and glue the seating together. Now I probably could have done all that much quicker with out here help but that wasn't the project.

At this point only one wheel on each axial is glued on and I will probably hit them with some black paint. I also removed the seats and hit the inside of the shoe box with some grey primer. Other than that i believe this project is go over to the ladies to finish the decorations. The ladies would be my wife and daughter. If I am lucky I will not have to touch the thing other than to maybe help with gluing the supports and seats in.


Monday, May 5, 2014

Iron Kingdoms - Campaign Startup


Like I have mentioned previously, my gaming group has decided to give Iron Kingdoms RPG a try and Friday saw our first sit down to go over the ins and outs and while we do go over some stuff it mostly just became a social event and a bunch of joking around. Some stuff did come out of the sessions including if I have it correct the following

Adventure Company - Mercenary Charter
Starting Location - Merin, Ord
Captain - Ordic Aristocrat/Investigator
Lieutenant - Khadoran Iron Fang/Military Officer

Rhulfolk Arcane Mechanik/Field Mechanik
Cygnaran Gun Mage/Soldier
Scharde Cutthroat/Pirate


I know that the Mercenary Charter is supposed to have a Treasurer but I don't think we actually got that far and while there was discussion on a name for the mercenary band I am still not entirely sure there was an agreement. To tell the truth I am not entirely positive that the above is correct but it is the best I can do with what I remember. Maybe one of them will read this and make a comment.

The one thing I no for sure is that the cutthroat/pirate is not a ranking officer in the Company. I know this because that is who I am playing and as the GM I don't want to be a decision maker in the Company.

I did decide that I wanted a different character sheet than the one supplied. So I created one of my own that does some of the calculations for me and it can be found on the Download page.

Rest and Relaxation!


Or maybe not. I was hoping but it was not to be. Friday evening had a group of us sitting around the table talking about Iron Kingdoms RPG stuff and trying not to completely screw our characters up. We got a Unicorn birthday cake for one of the guys (yes it was a joke) and all was good. Then came Saturday which meant a trip to the hobby store to get stuff for my daughter's project. Make a Safari Jeep out of a shoe box, nothing to major but we were only given 2 weeks to do it and today will see her coming home with another project that must be turned in on the same day. Now I know for a fact that this teacher did the exact same project last year so why can we not get a couple more weeks for the project? We send the shoe box in a month ago for who knows what reason. So yes I spent a part of Saturday and most of Sunday obtaining materials, coming up with ideas, designing the things, and partially fabricating it. At the moment i does actually look pretty nice.

This wasn't the only thing that destroyed the R&R though. Saturday night the plumbing backed up. Into the shower. Fortunately we know a plumber and everything was working again by Sunday afternoon. If you ever get a chance to become friends with a plumber DO NOT PASS IT UP!

It wasn't all bad though, Friday night went well and while we spent more time socializing than going over characters and discussing IKRPG rules (still haven't completely read through the magic section yet). I also got to play some Civ5 which saw me through the "British Invasion" achievement and into my 3rd attempt at a Brazilian Diplomatic Victory (also an achievement). I also found a copy of Evil Genius and decided to go ahead and reinstall it. It wasn't what I was looking for but hey what the hell it was a fun game.