LotRO: 5th Anniversary. Where’s my cake?!?
I’m late to the party but having a great time working my way through the festival. I’m loving the fireworks and the return of the ale fighting! I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed batting folks around. I’m using the ale fight as a way to earn tokens fast and have bought all the maps so far and the ‘You in a box’ cosmetic also. See?
I bet I know what’s in the present with me, too. My HAIR! ‘Cause it’s GONE! ACK! I suppose a bald Ranni the Hunter isn’t too bad. She’s kind of cute to be honest. But. Still. My hair! What’s a hobbit lass to do with no hair? Fast on me feet I realized how to fix it. I got the cake topper hat. Ah HA! Take that baldy!
Only …
DOES THAT LOOK LIKE CAKE TO YOU??
Foiled again! Worse though as now I look like an aged hobbit dude who got his little hobbit hands on a bunch of henna. It’s one thing for the present box to steal my hair but this, THIS, this is another all together! So I’ve removed/hidden the cake topper hat and gone back to the bald look because I love running around in a big present complete with a bow and sunflowers. Heh. I’ve seen big people wearing the present and the cake together and they both show just fine. Us little people, however, have been shafted! The nerve!
I will wear my bald head proudly, though, and earn more tokens (MUST have the fireworks pony) and take part in more fireworks displays. This has been an awesome festival celebration. Happy birthday, Turbine!
Lord of Ultima: Still picking the thorns outta my hand
Whoo_wee today was a crazy day. No, wait. I should back up. The last three days have been crazy! Today was just extra super crazy.
My alliance’s biggest enemy has been trying to take one of my alliance leaders castles for three straight days. They started this round on Friday the 13th (yeah, kinda cheesy) and continued into Saturday with a fresh launch of the usual attacks. I call them scatter attacks as they send a buttload of attacks to several different castles and have several members send to all or most of these castles they’ve picked as targets. Some of the attacks are fake and you just don’t know for sure who the real target is until the attacks start landing. This spreads your defense unless you decide to just pick a target or two to defend. It also makes you frustrated and, if the attacks are large enough in number, you feel a little panic wafting around the edges.
Another of the ‘typical attack’ tactics they use is to send a clearing attack designed to kill a horde of troops so that when the baron they are sending (can’t take a castle without one) in the siege attack gets there, the chances of the baron being killed off are minimized. This makes it super easy to dodge that first round of attacks, skip the clearing zerk and or cavalry armies and swoop in to kill the baron and siege off. The Sunday prior to these attacks my castle was a target and they freaking hit me H.A.R.D! But, because they goofed and under estimated us, causing their fakes to work too good, I wasn’t there to be hit with that brutal first wave. I, thanks to them, dodged it and my castle was saved. So we decided to dodge the first round of attacks on Friday and Saturday and it worked great.
Sunday we, and by we I mean me, decided to dodge a bit more and not get the bulk of our troops there until the third wave. We had big heavy ballista in route so I made sure to have some troops in our alliance leaders castle to help with the ballista but the meat and girth of our defense was still in route. This would have worked beautifully if our enemy had stuck to their normal way of attacking.
When I was little we were going to see my Grandma. She lived in a small township off a dirt road near our church. There were a few rose bushes on the side of this little dirt road and I wanted to pick her a rose. We weren’t going very fast at all, a snail’s pace rather and so I leaned as far out of the back seat window of our station wagon as I could and grabbed her the first rose I could reach.
Thorns and all. It hurt.
That’s what today’s attacks felt like. We thought we had it down pat and were relishing our soon-to-come victory when, instead, we were shocked with a world of pain! They put a tremendous amount of zerks in with the siege attacks. Siege attacks auto-repeat every hour until you call them off, there’s nothing left to kill or, if there’s a baron in the siege, the castle is taken. Oh, and there were a bazillion siege attacks. We lost over 200k troops (haven’t counted to be sure but think that’s right), 58k of them mine. We under estimated them this time and lost our alliance leaders castle. We lost two more castles but one was planned as the guy who owns it didn’t want it and the other, well, he’s not been in game in a couple of weeks so we didn’t even try to defend it. Loosing the one we all died to defend, however, that’s an experience the first time.
Perspective? It’s all pixels and it’s a TON of fun! And we learned a lot from it. I’m still picking the thorns from my hand and I have a feeling there will be more thorns coming soon, but we aren’t going down without a fight. Oh, and I should add that I walked into my Grandma’s house and presented her my torn up little rose with tears streaming down my face. I was proud of my accomplishment after all. I may not have been too patient as they extracted the rose from the palm of my hand (them thorns stick good!) but I was determined and did what I set out to do. Aiming to become a thorn …
Didn’t see that coming
It’s funny how fast you make friends in game when you find like-minded folks that are easy to chat with and fun to play with. I had a buddy in LoU that was my ‘best buddy’. We talked strategy all the time, tried to stay on top of who needed what in our alliance, made sure each other was up to date on what was going on and just had a great time playing together. Or, so I thought. He rage quit on me tonight. I didn’t see it coming. I picked up on something while we were talking about the days events and apologized for putting him on the defense as my intentions were to just discuss what happened and how we could fix it. Brainstorming. Only, he didn’t take it that way. He made some accusations that left me reeling in shock and now I’m just so sad. He was the one in our group that I’d trusted so completely he knew all my stats, info that an enemy could use to hurt me.
Because I thought we were solid.
I’m wondering why it’s so hard to believe that a gal can not only pick up fast but do well (if you can call what I’m doing ‘well’) in an empire building/war game? I’ve been playing games like this for years and I absolutely LOVE them!! I’ve been very fortunate to be grouped up with top notch players and you can bet I learned as much as I could from them. The game I learned the most from was MoW, or rather, the alliance I was in while playing MoW. Was extreme and very aggressive play and they picked me up when I had JUST started the game. Knowing I was new they told me to build x amount of troops and once I did, to go sit in a contested zone and defend it. I did, too, go sit there with my troops. And when the battles came, I lost the zone for our entire country. I was so embarrassed I wanted to quit but they were quick to tell me a few things, one being that throwing me into the fire like that was the best way to learn fast. And I did. I’m addicted to that play style now. It’s fast, fierce and rewarding.
What I’m trying to say is that I’m an aggressive and assertive player. Having leadership experience, I tend to step into it and run, too.
I think that’s what I did wrong with my buddy. He didn’t believe I was a new player. I don’t know how to convince him either. I do learn fast because I really love games like this and don’t want to do anything half-hearted. Most of these types of games have the same basic principles and when I told him that he was quick to say he’d played a lot of them, too. He sounded like he found me threatening in some way but for the life of me, I can’t figure out how. We were a team and that’s how I saw it.
Maybe it’s because I don’t always hold back on sharing my opinions. My husband has told me I have the tact of a falling brick sometimes. In a game if you aren’t using a voice app, you’re stuck with trying to read people based on text. My bluntness may have been misunderstood. Or maybe he was upset over the days events and took it out on me? I dunno. All I knew was that I didn’t want to have to defend me being a gal with my play style, being new to this particular game, or whatever else he was trying to accuse me of. I was surprised and embarrassed at how he made me feel. It’s a game, after all, right? Yeah, it is. But I thought he was my buddy, not just text in the chat window or pixels on the map. Really hate that he quit the server. Going to miss talking to him every day.
Games like Lord of Ultima aren’t for everyone. They take time to build your empire, your armies. You will lose your armies and have to rebuild them. Getting in with the right group of people absolutely makes the game. You have to be able to depend on your team and they have to be able to depend on you. And you find yourself making friends with the oddest assortment of folks. You look forward to them logging in every day, the random goofy chatter and you relish and celebrate your pixellated glories with them. They have some of the coolest dynamics I’ve seen because it all happens so fast. It just clicks and off it goes. (once you’re in the right alliance I should say) That’s why it sucks to lose one. Really does feel like losing a friend.
Lord of Ultima: City building away
What I loved most about the Sims was building. Well, that and the doorless room with a rocket launcher approach to making a grave yard! I didn’t much care for the social needs of my sims. I’d rather spend my time building elaborate mansions, small cottages, apartments, … I love building period. That’s one of the reasons I play these empire building war games while the other, of course, is being able to lay waste to a buttload of enemy troops. I’ve played some where you have a build queue of only two slots worth. That sucks donkey balls in a big way but you learn to live with it or you leave for greener build queues. Lord of Ultima has a very generous build queue with six slots. I still complain about the time sink involved in building your empire as, even with six slots, it feels like it takes forever. It’s amazingly generous, however, in this age of cash-shop pushing free to play games.
You have to build up your resource supply to get anywhere just like most other browser mmos I’ve played. Here you build woodcutter huts around forest nodes and boost production with saw mills and cottages. Stone requires quarries around the stone nodes and stone masons to boost (cottages boost wood, stone and iron production). Those are your two resource needs in building your actual city: wood and stone. They cover both buildings and city defense structures. Iron, another resource, is needed for certain troop types (others require wood) while food is needed to feed your troops, else they depart for more verdant pastures. I’ve yet to grow past the need for just a couple of farms and a mill per city yet.
Your starter city is where ever the map gods put you. Once you’re ready to found your next city you can put it anywhere, land locked or on a river. It’s still early stages for me so I’m keeping my ‘hood close together with no one city more than an hours travel time away. Quicker travel times help you cart resource supplies to your new city faster. Who doesn’t want to build that bad boy up fast! Fast is relative, of course, but luckily you get six build slots in this game.
Another thing I really like about city building is city shape. As you go up in city score (based on the level of your buildings and fortifications) your city will change its shape appearance on the map. When you first start out your city is tiny and square, not much to look at like the one in the above picture at the bottom right. When you reach 5000 in score your city becomes round in shape. I’m not sure when you switch from just round to the ’round with a little round city inside it’ look, but I have that on one of my cities. I’m close to getting a third city to the round shape. I LOVE that! When you castle a city it changes to an octagonal shape making it easy to spot and stand out on the region map. Right now, in my still-a-noob look at the game, I see city shapes as part of the reward for building better cities. It’s not but I like to pretend it is. Maybe I’m just easily amused …
Gotta check my build queues and see who needs what. …I like to build it build it, I like to build it build it …
LotRO: Hobnanigans, a blast from the past
(I was looking through old posts on another of my blogs and found this one. Just had to share/repost it here. I miss chicken ball!! Sadly, it hasn’t made an appearance in the game since the first time. I keep hoping they’ll bring it back as it was crazy fun!)
Originally posted June, 22, 2007: Hobnanigans, aka ‘Chicken Ball’
Hobnanigans- 2 teams of 5 on a field using sticks to bunt a chicken around with the objective of scoring a goal. Takes 3 goals to win. Sounds weird, doesn’t it?
Here we are waiting for a game of Chicken Ball to start. To kill time, one dwarf pulled out his drum and the rest of us started dancing. It may appear that I was ‘dancing for the guys’ but I can assure you it was completely coincidental. We were all doing our newly learned dances. I just happened to be in the center. 
The game hasn’t started yet but we’ve been allowed to pick up our sticks and enter the field. We’re waiting for another team to show up at this point. During this time, in every game I’ve participated in so far, we’ve played with emotes. For instance, clicking on another player and “fainting dead away at the sight of them” or dancing with each other. It’s a serious time killer and so much fun. We had one guy who accidentally clicked on another guy and ‘flirted’ with him. That was funny and I couldn’t let that pass without saying something. Poor Dondor….
Let the games begin! The chicken you see on screen is our ‘ball’. Here we are running to hit the chicken with our sticks. I took the names off screen to make it easier to see while playing.
