Dark Disney - Update

Updated the Shanghai and Primer with some minor changes and added a document on Attractions. Everything is still mechanics free or based on Pathfinder 1 until I get a copy of the Playtest rules for Pathfinder 2 which is slated for next week I believe. In the meantime here is this....

Dark Disney Campaign - First Posting

  This is the initial posting on the Dark Disney Campaign information. I have placed all the current documentation and well as the Maps (zipped file) on the Downloads page.

Et Tu?

Have you ever made a mistake in a game and not realized it until way later. You know that point were it would be more of a pain to go back and fix it. Well I made that mistake and for my part it was completely unintentional as in I didn't want to do it and hadn't even realized it happened. Well it did and now i see this guy all the time.

If you don't know who this is, he is the guy that Caesar sends after you when you piss him off. Now I don't remember exactly when i pissed Caesar off but i have had this guy and his cronies kill me twice now and I am tired of it. He wont even let me fix it. Walk down the street, Hey Caesar hates you now die. All I can think is that at some point I accidentally killed one of these guys while fighting someone else, because they have been all over the place. Someone abuses a merchant, probably the Legion. Someone fighting with gangers, probably the legion. There are more Legion in my playthrough than NCR and they are supposed to be in control of the area. At this point i guess my only recourse is to start treating the Legion like I treat the gangs and eliminate them on site. Wonder if this same stuff will happen with the NCR now. Accidentally kill one and they send out the goon squads.

Now for anyone that doesn't know what I am going on about I am currently playing through Fallout New Vegas. Yes I understand it is a fairly old game but we got it on sale recently and I figured I would give it a try. I am enjoying it but Caesar really annoyed me with this so I had to vent a bit. All in all it is a good game and if you can get around a number of bugs (there is a community drive patch that fixes a load) then it is well worth picking up if you see it on sale.

One Page Rules: Kill team - Sisters of Battle vs Imperial Guard (150 Points)

For a while now i have been wanting to check out the One Page Rules for Kill Team. I loved Necromunda in the past, but the Kill Team rules that GW published have been lack luster. I had mentioned that I had found a way for my daughter to play the few Sisters that I had collected a long time ago and she was game.

My Daughter's Sisters of Battle
Cannoness w/ Power Weapon and Rosarius
3x Sisters of Battle
Retributor w/ Linked Flamer


My Imperial Guard
Commander w/ Command Assistants (1 with Medipack)
2x Guard Units each with a flamer

This is the beginning setup, my daughter had spread out her line across the back while I placed my commander and one unit on the left and on on the far right. Sorry about the terrain we just grabbed what ever was around and didn't bother grabbing any trees other than the completed ones.

The first turn was uneventful other than i got very lucky with a flamer against a sister in a building. No amount of armorer will save you from 5 lucky hits with a flamer. She then rolled a wound roll of 1. At the beginning of turn 2 the above happened. The Canoness has 6 wounds and a weapon that gives her 3 attacks. I am pretty sure those guard are dead.

To my surprise only 1 died and I did 3 wounds to the Canoness. Maybe i should stay in melee and get all those points for killing her instead of doing the smart thing and running away. Second turn of melee. Canoness is down to 2 turns and the Flamer is Stunned. Now i cannot run away, oh bother. One can hope for 2 more turns and my daughter's bad wound rolls. 

For two turns my Daughter had a Sister in that same building and if it wasn't for the Medic in my command squad they would all be dead. Even in turn 4 they just keep taking pot shoots at each other. I did hit her once for a push back that did not go far enough to knock her from the second floor. I was very upset with her luck.

Wasn't going to happen, she got three hits and I rolled nothing and more of nothing. Everyone died, not even on the wound rolls, Two 1s and a 2 for the wound rolls. The rest of the battle went down hill for me, I got caught between a Sister and the Retributor with my last Guard unit and even with a flamer I got no wounds on the Retributor and she took out 2 Guardsmen. I did get lucky in the final turn and stunned the Retributor but was then finished off by the flanking Sister. 

All in all the game was fun and my Daughter caught on far faster than I expected. I did go into the battle expecting to be kind to her and give her a bit due to it being her first time and I must say she exploited it. 

Sisters of Battle WIN!

I will say that the Orders rule for the Imperial Guard is rather nice and if i had got it off in the last turn it may have changed the out come but with the horrible attack rolls I had I am not sure it would have mattered.

If you are interested in a pretty good set of Skirmish rules for 40K definitely go take a look a the One Page Kill Team rules. They also have skirmish rules for Fantasy as well as simpler rules for 40k and Fantasy. 

One Page Rules

Modified Resonant Rise: Town Hall Tour and Village Building

I have two things for today, firstly a couple of pics from my Town Hall and then some stuff from my Village that i started building and moving villagers too. I am not having much luck with the villagers though. For what ever reason monsters seem to really want to eat them.

So firstly the Town Hall, I call it the Town Hall because it contains the Ancient Warfare block called the Town Hall and is where all the Ancient Warfare NPCs return at night and such. I am not done cleaning it up but I have moved some items in.

I added a small watch tower to the top of the Town Hall, I did this more to allow for roof top access to the tree farms and because I got stuck during a Blood Moon. At least with the tower I am now able to see if the mobs walking through the farm area can be easily handled or if I need to stay put.

This is the crew, I have since added a couple more couriers to the mix but for the most part these are the fellows that do all the work. Need to get Benny a bit more help since he is my only Miner at the moment and the quarry is 32 x 32. Toby is still working with all the farms and animals while Bob deals with all my trees, he just picked up a Birch farm. Cid well he deals with the new Storage System.

And here is the Storage System, think of it as a archaic AE2 storage system if you would like. As you can see Fred seems to be doing some work, his only job is keeping to others feed. He takes raw food from storage and runs it through the Steve's Workshop in the back which has four furnaces and then moves the cooked food to the Town Hall. Make my life so much easier since Hubert moves all the animal products from the farms into storage.

Nothing special here really, just some bulk storage for the quarry and tree farms as well as my setup for the metallurgy grinder. My third courier named Markus actually drops some of the ores off at the grinder for me. I am still collecting some ore so i can finish setting him up. Currently he only grinds Iron ore. 

This is what came do to the Blood Moon that happened after the one that forced a Town Hall Tower. These mine carts go back and forth between my House and the Town Hall. There have been several occasions when a monster with a stupid amount of hit points has shown up in the village and I needed to cross the lawn to the tower to get a good shot on them. Running into the wild with said monster has ended poorly for me in the past, but not anymore.

So i have been doing a little bit of work on the village. Ancient Warfare 2 has a template system that comes stock with most of the vanilla village buildings and makes setting them up pretty quick. My only complaint is that the blocks used to build these templates seems to get corrupt if you pick them back up after setting them. So be warned that all the building materials for your building may be lost if you have to move this block.

I build a second Town Hall structure on this side of the village, didn't know it I was going to need it but i put it here as a just in case. Yes it is under the church, figured that I was probably going to need roof access and a watch tower so i used the church. From this angel you don't even notice the Town Hall. I may run a tunnel or rail here as well since you never know if you may need it.

The view from the top of the church, I did add a farm and no it is not the standard vanilla farm. I only added it because I like the look, so yes it is decoration. In the background you can see the Japanese Village that belongs to my neighbors. They expanded rather rapidly but seem to be stuck looking for iron and since their miner seems to be lazy haven't found any lately. I make take pity on them and go give them some before to long.

The following are just some road view pictures of the area. I do plan to put in some roads but haven't got around to it yet. I was actually trying to get some villagers moved in but have had a hard time keeping them alive. Of the 11 villagers I attempted to move in only 1 have survived. I have also had 2 Blood Moons since I started the project. I get 4 villagers and a Blood Moon hits. There seems to be a pattern since before I picked up the villagers I only saw 2 Blood Moons. I need to come up with a better defense that doesn't require lighting up everything within 256 blocks and a wall. 

Modified Resonant Rise: Mod List

I finally remembered, for anyone interested here is the mod list.

Now I did start with the base Resonant Rise 3 and added a very limited number of mods from their packs and threw a couple others on top. The only mod from the RR3 pack that I updated was Ancient Warfare 2 to fix a crash when placing an NPC. I also left the configs alone with the exception of setting the Thaumcraft research to easy. I figured it was the only way I was going to use the mod and I really hate the research system. Reminds me to much of work and I work more than I like.

Modified Resonant Rise: Base Tour

Figured I would grab a couple of pics of the current farmstead since i cannot rightfully call it a base. The house was a pre-generated structure which i added a balcony to, though I never finished the railing. I did forget to grab the mod list for this so I will try and remember it for the future. 

I took this from the top of the uncompleted town hall where the AW2 workers stay. In the background is the Chocobo Barn where i have my first blue chocobo baby as well as my basic food farms. The Barley farm on the right is mostly used for Bread for my Workers.

Here are all the AW2 farms, Toby tends all of these pretty much on his own. In the back near the Chickens in a new Carrot farm and I have added some Sheep to the Cattle farm since i have a need for the Wool. The Japanese village north of me wants quite a bit of it so I figured I would supply them.

This is on top of the town hall, it is just my tree farms and behind it is my mine. currently neither are doing much and I need to add a farm for Birch. The quarry isn't much since I simply placed the station in the side of the wall.

Simple fish farm that i really only put in place to give a little extra fish, ink sacks and slime balls. Yes the Harvestcraft Octopus convert to slime balls.

There isn't really anything inside the house at the moment besides a bed and a minimal amount of tools. I do have a full kitchen but I will save that for when I have more in the house.

Been Playing: Modified Resonant Rise!

I don't normally have a lot of free time during the week and sometimes my weekend isn't much better. So when I get some free time it typically needs to be filled with something i can stop at a moments notice and that it I need an extended reprieve from is easy to get back into. One of the best games I have found for that has been Minecraft, you can hit escape to pause and if it needs to be shutdown it isn't to hard to figure out what you were last doing. It is also easily changed through mods. As of late I have been playing Resonant Rise as you can probably tell from the image above but in this instance I selected a very limited number of mods from the list they had and added a couple of others. I have been adding and removing mods for the last week or so and playing a bit to see if i like the feel of the pack, so far so good though. I like the feel of it , have been enjoying building again and not just farming resources to make tech. I have magic in the pack but haven'f felt a need to advance in it yet mostly because I haven t needed to.

At the moment I am building up the area around my house with some Ancient Warfare 2 infrastructure. Getting the basics running, Wheat Farm, Cattle, Pigs, Chickens and pretty soon a couple Tree farms for lumber and charcoal. Besides Ancient Warfare we have Millenaire installed, mostly because i hate seeing the same types of villages all the time and I like actually having something else to do when I don't want to work on the House or gather resources. Go hang out at the closest Millenaire village and see what is going on. Unfortunately the current version does have a bug that causes some villagers to get stuck in loops on occasion. I also added Minecraft Comes Alive, this was added for a similar reason to Millenaire but instead of the village being boring to look at it is the villagers themselves. Oh and guards, someone has to protect those villages.

Mod packs are an interesting thing, you can look at most pack listings and a any given time the packs being released are mostly copies of the same themes. Hardcore Survival, HQM, Void Island, etc... These themes come back around a lot and if i see one that seems different I usually will grab it and play it for a bit. I still go back to Regrowth every couple of updates or so. Most of them have similar mod list and do similar things. I get really bored of that really quick. I haven't had that issue with this one yet and I am enjoying doing the little things which is odd for me. Maybe i am just getting old but I spent a whole play session building farms and looking for new Harvestcraft seeds (I need Onions). Another session I simply laid out the fencing for the AW2 Animal Farms. All the while worrying about the Grimoire of Gaia monsters on the other side of the hill that had been staring at me oddly. You never know if those Dryad are going to get upset with you for no real reason (maybe cutting down the trees around them is bad).

If your interested in Resonant Rise you can get the ATLauncher here. Maybe in the future I will post the mod list and some images from my play through.

Homework and Painting time!

So sitting at the kitchen table seems to have forced some focus on my daughter and what used to take her until 5:30 to finish now only take until 4 - 4:30. So if I sit at the kitchen table and do something I can drop an hour off the time it takes for her to do her homework. I think that is pretty good if i do say so my self.

So what have I been doing with myself while my daughter does her homework. Well Tuesday I did this. Sister Test Paint: WIP

Things to Do, Homework to force upon my Daughter....

For quite a while now my work week goes something like this. Work, come home and yell at my daughter to do her homework while she ignores me, make dinner, and then do all the stuff to get the kids to bed. In the time between getting home from work and yelling at my daughter about her homework I typically have 30 to 45 minutes of somewhat free time. For the last couple of months this free time was spent playing a bit of Minecraft while my son tried to grab my mouse or some other distraction. Now everything has to change, since I need to stop yelling at my daughter about her homework and get her to sit down and actually do it. So i came up with a plan!

While I would love to sit down and play Civilization Beyond Earth and let her waste her time until i have to cook dinner I figured I would take the time to do some Warhammer 40k stuff. Yesterday, my daughter finished her homework in record time as I sat across the kitchen table from her and assembled some Space Wolves. Hey if this works I may actually get some painting done at some point. I will most definitely get everything assembled if she cannot learn to focus on her homework a bit more.

So it looks like i may be getting some hobby time for a while. Probably better than playing video games anyhow.

Attack of the B-Team: Minecraft

A couple of weeks ago I can across some new videos by PSJ on YouTube where he started on a new Minecraft server with a mod pack called Attack of the B-Team. Scott and I really liked what we saw so he set up a server. We played on it for a couple of days and then he had some hardware issues and had to rebuild, that was about two weeks or so ago. Now the server is back up and we have a new seed, everything seems to be very stable and other than a couple of the normal Minecraft glitches we are doing pretty good.

I started off this round of Minecraft my creating a new term or two, the first is "Pulling a Jeff". This is where you die within the first couple of minutes after spawning. The second is "Uber Jeff", in which case you die three times within 30 minutes of spawning. These terms apparently don't take into consideration if it is a fresh spawn or you simply log into the game. Now I must say i haven't played in survival mode in a long time so I needed to get back into that mode of "OMG EVERYTHING IS OUT TO GET ME!". Well it is.

I remember vanilla Minecraft having far fewer mobs than on this mod pack. So in Vanilla you may see a zombie or two, a skeleton, and a creeper. In B-Team. I think the Zombies spawn in groups of 3-5 with the occasional skeleton or two and possibly a creeper. If you happen to kill all that then chances are at least 1 of not 2 more groups have already spawned somewhere around you and it is now a lost cause. Just go ahead and die. Even in better armor you can still be overwhelmed at night so "Always Be Afraid". Oh and one more thing, there are the mini-zombies that some times appear, typically with a batch of other zombies and man are they fast. So if you get popped and when you turn around you don't see anything, LOOK DOWN!

So the first couple of days for me beside dying and finding the closest whole to hide in and make equipment was to cross a mud filled  field, a land of burning ash and lava (Wastelands Biome), and then climbing into a Canyon Biome in which I was to build my Test Lab. I did cheat a bit and took a look around in a creative single player just to see if I could find a place to build.

So my plan was simple, build a test lab in the side of a canyon and test out the mod. Once done figure out what I wanted to do next. So my test lab is up and running and i will get some screen shots up at a latter date. I am on my third installment of power going from 2 Steam Dynamos to a Magmatic Dynamo, and now to a fully automated five steam dynamo tree farm power plant. Just don't look at the mess below the tree farm. I have a fully automated bread company going on as well. I don't touch anything from the growing of barely to the baking of bread, nothing is touched. I open a chest and there is a stack of bread.

This is nice and all and I have lots more stuff to test but the Village is my primary project. With the help of my buddy Scott, we built a fully populated Village and have spawned enough villager to get an Iron Golem. I will have pictures of this I just need to grab them.

So this is where I am right now and I figured it was time to start talking about it since the server is stable and I am at a place in the game where I am not in a constant fear of dying. 

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?

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

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