Free Candy For Everyone

I bought Civ4 first thing when it came out, the special edition pre-order. So I was dismayed to find that though the manual was in English, the foldout chart of technologies and other information was in French. And my French just isn’t all that good. A helpful comment pointed me to where I could ask for an English chart. It finally arrived this week, so today I decided it was about time for me to give the game another try.

I haven’t played the game for a good while. Been a bit busy with other games (like Guitar Hero and the unrelentingly addictive World of Warcraft) as well as outside stuff. Yes, RL stuff! Anyway, I have tried to see if people are talking about the game. I’m really curious for when the full release of the tools for modding Civ4 will be released. Despite some snide comments I made about how moddable the game is, I’m ever hopeful for something intriguing and different to be done to the game.

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Because I just love taking “pictures” of my travels, I’ll post some more shots here for you to look at and ponder my addiction. Here are a few more festive shots for the holidays:

I completed one of the holiday quests and got a snowman costume mailed to me. Here are a bunch of people all dressed up and levitating (don’t know why they’re levitating!) in Orgrimmar.

I had a fun incident where I couldn’t quite figure out how to take off the snowman costume. And you can’t move at all as a snowman. So yeah, if that happens to you, just right-click on the costume icon in the upper right. Heheh.

Oh, and Shaleyla, my Tauren Druid, is now a guild master. She is in charge of the amazing Crazy Cattle guild on Llane. We rock. Ok, so really there are only a handful of us right now. But we will rock, and that’s the important part of the whole thing, isn’t it?

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Learn something new everyday. Reading a post over at WOW Insider led me to this official forum post about priests. Apparently, you get different spells depending on which race you play. I was wondering why I had a quest that involved doing nothing that gave me a spell. Here’s a the bit about the spells, there’s also some other interesting info there if you play a priest.

Priests are the only class that gets racial spells at level 10 and 20 through quests given by priest trainers in major cities. There are multiple ranks of each spell that you can upgrade as you level. The highest rank of each spell is described below:

• Desperate Prayer (Level 10). (Dwarf/Human only.)
  Rank 7 - Instantly heals the caster for 1324 to 1562.
• Starshards (Level 10). (Night Elf only.)
  Rank 7 - Rains starshards down on the enemy target’s head, causing 798 Arcane damage over 6 seconds.
• Touch of Weakness (Level 10). (Undead only.)
  Rank 6 - The caster’s next damaging melee attack will cause 64 additional Shadow damage and reduce the damage caused by that target by -20 for 2 minutes.
• Hex of Weakness (Level 10). (Troll only.)
  Rank 6 - Weakens the target enemy, reducing damage caused by -20 for 2 minutes.
• Fear Ward (Level 20). (Dwarf only.)
  One rank only - Wards the friendly target against fear. The next fear effect used against the target will fail, using up the ward. Lasts 10 minutes.
• Feedback (Level 20). (Human only.)
  Rank 5 - Enchants the Priest’s weapon to cause feedback on enemy targets. Each hit has a chance of draining 105 mana from the target. For each mana drained in this way, the target takes 1 damage.
• Elune’s Grace (Level 20). (Night Elf only.)
  Rank 5 - Reduces ranged damage taken by -29 for 3 minutes.
• Devouring Plague (Level 20). (Undead only.)
  Rank 6 - Afflicts the target with a disease that causes 904 Shadow damage over 24 seconds. Damage caused by the Devouring Plague heals the caster.
• Shadowguard (Level 20). (Troll only.)
  Rank 6 - The caster is surrounded by shadows. When a melee or ranged attacker hits the caster, the attacker will be struck for 116 Shadow damage. Attackers can only be damaged once every few seconds. 3 charges. Lasts 10 minutes.

That’s cool. I wonder if they were gonna do more of those, but just didn’t get around to it?

Gamespot has a preview of the Empire Earth 2 Expansion pack, which is a project I’ve been working on for a good chunk of this year. It’s currently one of the links on their front page, or you can see it directly here.

The winter time decorations went live last night. They’re not quite as much fun as those for Halloween, in my opinion. But I still couldn’t resist taking some pictures. You’ll see these are taken with my Tauren, who is too tall! I had to sit her down so she wouldn’t block my shots!

Here’s the center of Thunder Bluff, where they’ve put up a tree complete with decorations and presents. There are some wreaths on nearby buildings as well.

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