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The Prancing Pony (Fellowship of the Ring Empire Thread)
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| Apologies to readers who don't remember all the earlier Fellowship stories that I referenced there. That's probably everyone. |
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I remembered! 
          
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BAM!
That's the noise my 60K games make. If they ever start going "BOOM!" I'll join the Guardians.
Currently taking me one hour ten. At that rate, I'd have to put in five hours a day to equal Lothmorg's output.
  
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| some magic metaverse recalc |
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Frogboy fixed the aging of game over 331 days old, and it gave many of the veteran players some scores back.
[Message Edited]
 
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| So the personal profile score now looks like the mpts score. |
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Mine too. You know what this means? We finally overtook the Special Forces!
Will they be shoved back into the lead next time they get an automatic recalc?
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I wondering if I submit a game now, will it crash or lift my score?
  
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| I wondering if I submit a game now, will it crash or lift my score? |
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Sadly, I think you're first game will drop you score, but after that it should go up.
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Your first game Ray will likely kill your score, but after that it is only up from there!
   
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I wouldn't have thought it would hurt Ray's score much, maybe not at all. It's already been declining from automatic recalcs, hasn't it? And it would probably boost it a lot at the same time anyway. His contribution to the Fellowship is 200K and his Metaverse score is 275K, and submitting games seems to raise empire score to approximately your personal score...
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Someone who had taken a galciv vacation recently came back and submitted a score. I don't recall who it was (I think it was a GROSS member), but they noted a drop in score on the first game, but after that, their score began to rise again.
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KABAM! "Fleet Admiral Matthew Downie". No longer will Ricbayer be able to order me to polish his buttons and bring him breakfast in bed!
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| I wouldn't have thought it would hurt Ray's score much, maybe not at all. It's already been declining from automatic recalcs, hasn't it? And it would probably boost it a lot at the same time anyway. His contribution to the Fellowship is 200K and his Metaverse score is 275K, and submitting games seems to raise empire score to approximately your personal score... |
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Our scores went down with our first submission back because of that extraordinary decay. So in theory, if that's what was fixed, Ray's score should go up due to the +75k Boost he'll get and all he should have left to decay is a partial month.
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Looks like it. I see Ray's empire score has gone up to the higher value without him having to submit anything, but vincible's hasn't. (Yet.)
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Fade Out
“Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...”
“He’s fading fast! We’ve got to shock him!”
“Dammit! I thought he was stable! What happened?”
“Clear!”
A boy stands on a beach, throwing stones into the surf. The wind rises. A cyclone lifts up a spray of sand. The child turns, and covers his eyes.
The sand spins itself into the figure of a humanoid. The child tries to flee, but a gritty hand falls upon his shoulder and fixes him to the spot.
“Ricbayer?” says the figure, in a voice like the rushing of the waves.
The child is too scared to speak.
“I am Falaskel, Warden of the Furthest Shores. You have been chosen, Ricbayer, chosen to be the guardian of the world-as-it-is.”
“Dude,” says the child. “I’m eight. Are you stupid, or something?”
“I know much of the ways of Fate. I see that in times yet to come, you will be the world’s greatest swordsman. But more than that, you will be the one best placed to put things to rights when fools meddle in the destiny of the world. That is why you have thus been called. You will be protected from the effects of magic that changes the past.”
“Huh?”
“I shall impart to you, and you alone, the Counterspell that can restore things-as-they-are.”
“Dude, I’m not a wizard. I don’t have any magic.”
“All it requires is that you borrow one tiny drop of magic, when the time comes, and the Counterspell will be open to you.”
“How do I do that?”
“You will see. Let me deliver the knowledge to you. Hold still. This may come as a shock.”
The entity places its coarse hand upon Ricbayer’s forehead. Something passes between them. A wave of pain flashes across his body. He screams.
“Take care of yourself, Ricbayer,” says the figure, now crumbling back into the beach from which it came. “If you die, then hope dies also.”
“Beeeeeeeee...”
“Clear!”
A wave of pain flashes across his body.
“No response! No response at all!”
“He’s been under too long! He’s gotta be a vegetable by now!”
“One more try! Clear!”
Two hands reach up from the bed. They grip the wrists of the green-clad man in the mask.
And the body speaks. “Stop. Doing. That.”
“I’m a little confused,” says the younger of the two men in green standing over him. “Is he dead or isn’t he?”
A look of comprehension appears in the eyes of the masked man. “Security were wrestling with an enraged Trekkie in here a few minutes ago. They must have knocked out one of the monitor-cables. His heart was beating all along!”
Ricbayer looks around the room. He sees a tray of blades and needles and clamps. The men’s green robes are stained with blood. It appears to be some kind of torture chamber.
“I don’t like torturers,” he says.
“Huh?”
Ricbayer forces the man’s hands back until the metal prods touch his chest. A shockwave passes over both of them. Ricbayer braces himself and weathers the pain. His captor shudders violently and falls to the ground.
“Hey!” says the other man. Ricbayer turns on him and punches him out.
Ignoring the pain of his wounds, he pulls himself up and checks his body. It’s still covered in tiny cuts, but he forces himself to his feet. His sword is gone. He considers taking one of the scalpels of torture, but decides not to soil his hands with such a tainted blade. Instead, he plunges out into the corridor, and starts his search for the exit.
“What a place!” he says to himself. “What kind of monstrous regime would need so large a dungeon?” Everywhere around him are sick and injured people, waiting meekly for whatever punishment their jailers think to inflict next.
At last, he comes across an exit. It is barred by a great wall of glass. Outside, it is snowing.
“Excuse me,” says one of two large men, walking up behind him. “Would you please return to your bed?”
“I think not,” says Ricbayer.
The two men draw simple one-handed long black clubs from their belts. Clearly, torture is so important to these people that they are determined to take him alive.
He blocks the first blow, and punches the guard firmly in the stomach. The other grabs hold of him. They wrestle while the first man recovers, and comes at him again. Ricbayer kicks that one low, then turns and flings his remaining assailant over his shoulder, into the wall of glass, which shatters.
“You’re free!” he shouts, to the other prisoners. “Flee while you still can!”
But they just look at him with blank stares. He sees no hope in their eyes. It is as if the land outside is no better than the prison they are in now.
“Downie! What kind of hellish world have you wrought!” he cries, and hurls himself out into the freezing night.
A fat bearded man behind the reception desk watches him go. “Now there’s a guy who doesn’t want to pay his medical bill,” he says.
“Shut up, Jerry,” says a small woman in white, hobbling by on a crutch.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Enormous metal beasts roar up and down the road, like horseless chariots, or wheeled spaceships. He presses his back up against the wall, and advances cautiously. People stare at him oddly as they pass him by.
In theory, he ought to be able to put a stop to all this madness at once. All he needs is some magic, and he can work his great Counterspell. But where is the magic? Gone. This world feels drained, dead. He sniffs the air, the way Falaskel taught him. Nothing. Or... almost nothing. Was that...? Yes! A single drop of magic remains, in all the world. It’s just a question of finding it. His sense of purpose renewed, he sets out on this most dangerous of quests.
A day later he finds himself drawn to a great fortress. The magic lies inside, he knows. Hunger chews at his innards, but he pays it no heed. Clutching in his hand a crude sword he liberated from an antiques store, he approaches the enormous gates. A sign above them says, “Rest Home for the Victims of Science-Fictional Delusion Syndrome”. He begins to hack at the lock.
“Hold it right there!” says a voice.
Ricbayer stops his work and turns. The speaker is a man in blue, pointing a small black object at him. It looks blunt and harmless.
“Lose the blade, kid,” says the man.
“You think to stop me with naught but a club?” says Ricbayer. “Know you that I am the world’s greatest swordsman?” He takes a step in the man’s direction. Half a dozen yards lie between them.
“Freeze or I drop you!” shouts the blue man.
Ricbayer raises an eyebrow. What is the device in his hand? Some sort of hand-phaser? Better to rush him. He will surely be stunned and captured, but it is better than timidly surrendering.
“Last chance, buddy!”
Only... there is a look in the man’s eye. He’s seen it only once before, when he confronted the dark magus Sereg-Dae and his Wand of Death. Whatever this man in blue is holding, it must be some kind of deadly weapon.
Ricbayer lowers his sword.
Ricbayer is seated in an interview room.
“So, let me get this straight,” says the cop. “You’re a warrior from Middle-Earth, and you’re here because an elf named Downie...”
“‘Downie’. You’re pronouncing it wrong.”
“Whatever. This elf cast a spell that altered the time-streams, destroying your world completely and calling our world into being in its place?”
“That’s right.”
“And you, being some kind of guardian of time, you intend to find the last magic in the world and use it to destroy our world and restore yours?”
“Indeed. May I now go on my way?”
“Look, we have a place for people like you...”
Ricbayer is locked in a cell with a bunch of hardened criminals while they ‘process’ him. He’s not sure what processing involves, but it involves paper and worries him.
“Are you looking at me?” says a big man with a spider-web tattooed across his face.
“Yes,” says Ricbayer. “What happened to your face?”
Next morning, the policeman returns. “OK, we’ve found a place for you,” he says. He looks at the cell. Ricbayer is the only one standing. The others are scattered around the floor, bruised and comatose.
“You’re making trouble again?” says the policeman.
“They were like that when I got here,” says Ricbayer.
Securely handcuffed, Ricbayer is shoved into one of the metal chariots and driven away. “You’re into that Lord of the Rings stuff, huh?” says the cop. “I found it kinda slow and dull myself. I like something faster and funnier. You know, like Pirates of the Caribbean. Isn’t Johnny Depp brilliant?”
Ricbayer remains silent. He strains at the metal links binding him. He thinks he can snap them if he pushes hard enough. The question is, is it the right time?
He laughs and relaxes when he sees where they’re taking him: The Rest Home for the Victims of Science-Fictional Delusion Syndrome.
They bind him again, now in a leathery jacket with sleeves that fasten his hands to his body. They assure him that a doctor will be around to see him soon, and leave him to talk to the other patients.
Most of them aren’t in the mood for conversation. “Pod people! They’re all pod people!” says one to himself.
“The truth is out there!” says another. “They took my sister!”
He still can’t see where the source of magic is. He sits himself down next to three people who seem a little more rational.
“How did you come to be here?” he says.
“They sent me back,” says the first, a bald man. “There was... a plague. Some kind of disease. Wiped out most of the population. Needed to find the cause. So they sent me back in time to before it happened, to collect DNA samples. If only I could remember... Something about monkeys?”
“They put me here to keep me from talking,” says a tough looking woman. “A robot from the future came to kill me, to stop me fathering the saviour of mankind. Managed to destroy it. Only, you see, they kept the bits! There’s a war coming! Twenty years from now, the machines will have wiped out most of mankind!”
“No they won’t!” says the bald man. “It’s the plague that’s going to do that!”
“Killer robots!” shouts the woman.
“Plague!” shouts the bald man. The woman strikes him hard across the face with the back of her fist. A fight breaks out. Eventually, the two are separated, sedated, and isolated.
“How about you?” says Ricbayer, to last in the group.
“Hi! I’m Kevin,” he says. “Don’t mind Bruce and Linda. Between you and me, I’m not really a human. I’m from outer space.”
“Altarian?” says Ricbayer, calmly.
“Uh... From a planet called K-Pax.”
“Never been there,” says Ricbayer. “What’s the planet quality like?”
“I don’t care for your attitude. Who are you supposed to be?”
Ricbayer tells the man his story.
“Wow!” says Kevin. “You are a total loony! Please stay away from me.”
And then Ricbayer sees someone he recognises.
“Downie?” he says.
“Please, call me Matthew,” says Downie. “You... You look familiar.” He looks pathetic in the plastic robe they made him wear. Not like an elf at all.
“It’s you, isn’t it? The world’s last source of magic!”
“Magic?” laughs Downie. “There’s no such thing. I made the same mistake myself, when they brought me here. But they soon cured me of that, with pills, and something called ECT.”
“You must remember! We met in Gondor! We battled the Drengin together!”
“Ha ha ha! I used to be insane like you! Look at these ears! I’ve tried to pull them off, but they won’t come off! I must have once had plastic surgery to make me look more elfin! And I don’t even remember it! How crazy was I? I’m going to have to have surgery again to put me back to normal!”
“You have those ears because you’re an elf!”
“Ha ha ha! Ridiculous! No-one believes in elves any more!”
“Everyone here who believes in elves, clap your hands!” shouts Ricbayer.
Only one man claps his hands, a fat man with a white beard.
“I wouldn’t take him too seriously,” says Downie. “He believes he accidentally killed Santa Claus and has to replace him.”
“Don’t you believe in magic?” says Ricbayer.
“Of course not!”
“Don’t you want to believe?”
“I want to believe!” shouts the ‘truth is out there’ man.
“I suppose a little magic might be nice,” says Downie. “But we have to live in the real world.”
“No we don’t!” says Ricbayer. “We have a choice!”
“What do you expect me to do?”
“You... you could sing a song.”
“No, I did that when I got here, and they taught me not to do it any more. I don’t want to be bad. Bad people get punished.”
“Go on, just one. Sing to me about... magic.”
Downie frowns, struggling inwardly, and then suddenly bursts into a loud and tuneless song:
If you want to learn to love your neighbour, raise funds to launch a holy war
Or tell friends they’ll go to hell unless they learn to forgive
Then for you a new religion will be as good as pure oxygen
But I’m an elf and I myself know how I want to live...
If you want to know how far to Pluto, or the calories in a burrito
Or be accurately diagnosed with a terminal disease...
Then what you want is the appliance of a little modern science
But I know a little something that can beat it with ease...
If you lack strength and dexterity, or wargs have got you trapped in a tree
Or if every day your life seems grey, boring and tragic
To turn rocks into bogs, create poison fogs, change men into logs or summon demon dogs
Friend, have no fear, the solution is clear - and that’s magic!
And as he finishes the song, there is a magical moment of silence. And Ricbayer reaches out and picks the magic from the air, and touches it to his lips, and whispers his secret word.
He feels a glorious sense of relief as the world starts to fade out, like the shadow it always was. He is left in a limbo, but knows it will not last long; a newer, truer world will emerge from the void. He catches hints of sights and sounds and smells in the air, hints of mystery and adventure, of victory and tragedy, of enemies to fight and wrongs to right.
“So, what do we do now?” says Downie, a voice in the fog.
“Whatever we want,” says Ricbayer.
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Another excellent story! Thank you! 
 
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Go Downie!
Just started my first Galciv (AP) game after my four-five months break.
Tiny, everything random, Maso.
Took diplomacy and pop growth and went on my usual tech trading spree. It's 2180 now and I've taken two minors and looking at the situation, the game is in the bag. I'll just play out the game for submission.
First impressions of AP - play-wise not much different from the game I played months back. The additional 2 races basically makes the game easier because you have less chances of a runaway AI superpower and more races to trade with. The minors still fall for the old trick of getting to send their whole fleet to war while you mop them up. The tech trading allows me to pick up freighters and warships cheap and spend my production on social. Noone has built any wonders by 2180 and I think I would be getting a lot of the early ones. Diplomacy wise, no one asked for any tribute and I offered none, everyone still at neutral or above.
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| not much different from the game I played months back. The additional 2 races basically makes the game easier |
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Yeah, that's what we found.
I tend to get beaten to most of the early wonders. It's mostly down to luck (and the difficulty in maintaining a high spend rate in a big galaxy.)
Funny thing, I don't seem to get minor races any more - even if I don't switch them off deliberately.
I see we lost Weyrleader. Oops. Oh well. It probably doesn't make much difference at this stage.
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| have you tried the campaign yet? |
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The difficulty level isn't very well balanced. And you get no metaverse points.
On the other hand, it's interesting to be in situations where you can't use diplomacy to get out of inconvenient wars.
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| I see we lost Weyrleader. |
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Yes, thank you!
I guess I'll leave 1400 to you. 
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