Armored Elephant showcase at ES
| August 31 |
Armored Elephant showcase at ES
"The Armored Elephant is extremely expensive, costing more gold than any other upgrade (...) He is no faster than a normal war elephant, and he doesn't even have a hit point bonus. What he does have is a tiny combat bonus and a huge Siegecraft bonus. (...) By actual count, it took a lone armored elephant 25 seconds to pound through a fortification, where it took a single heavy catapult a whole minute. Because of the elephant "trample" effect, the elephant destroys a fairly wide radius of the wall, too."
| August 28 |
Ask your questions about Rise of Rome!
Finally, you have the chance to ask everything about Rise of Rome that you want to know - just go to the Rise of Rome board where you can submit all your questions. They will be answered by the guys from Gamesmania who are currently having fun testing the beta of the expansion :) You can see their first impressions at this RoR sneak peek.
You will see that I have also posted some questions, as I do not have the game yet and I want to know how the gameplay is - especially for the new tribes.
| August 27 |
Interview with Stephen and Chris Rippy here!
The interview with Stephen and Chris is a must read! I won't give away any spoilers here, just head quickly to that page ;) Many thanks to them for taking their time.
New sound editor
Juha Rako programmed a new sound editor for AoE. It can
RoR Map Type - Hill Country
In this week's showcase at ES, the hill country map is presented:
"The Hill Country Map is perfect if you hate naval warfare. There isn't a single spec of water anywhere on it.
The absence of water has two effects; first, random fish distribution won't slant the game for or against you; second, it's harder than most maps to totally wall off. The many hills mean that you can almost always find a good elevation for your towers. Games on Hill Country maps are a lot like Highland, only more so."
Back Orifice strikes back
A few new tools with names like "silk rope" allow crackers to bury the BackOrifice installation program within another application, turning that one into a Trojan Horse. Because BO is encryped, Antivirus programs will not find it. This means that on any Win9x machine, extra care and backups are required, and Win9x should not be used anymore at work because one infected machine can compromise an entire WAN.
| August 25 |
The Uber campaign is here ;)
Finally, Eggman's campaign has arrived. Go to the page and download it - I am sure you will enjoy it.
Link reviewer wanted
I am very busy and do not have enough time to review all the pages who would like to have a link from my page. Because I do not just want to judge pages from the first glance, I would like it if someone could review the pages for me. If you want to help me reviewing them (or more), just send me a mail.
New e-mail address
You can now contact me at telcontar@mordor.ch. This will help me to process my e-mails more effiently and is also a pretty cool e-mail address :)
| August 23 |
Fire galley showcased at ES
Fire Galleys, the new ships with two large sails, are the RoR unit of the week at Ensemble's page.
"They are much better than triremes in single combat; triremes have to outnumber fire galleys by 2:1 or more to ensure victory. (...) Fire galleys are vulnerable to catapult triremes, though. (...) With the addition of the fire galley, the Iron Age war at sea now takes on a rock-paper-scissors form of interaction -- Fire Galley > Trireme > Catapult Trireme > Fire Galley. Oh yes, one interesting tip. No civ gets both cat triremes _and_ fire galleys. It's one or the other, never both."
Poll results
The result of this poll about the new rule (that punishes every 10th abandonment with a loss of 100 points) was 50 - 50. Half of the players appreciate the new rule, the other half thinks that giving a penalty every 10th game is unfair and a disadvantage to people with "laggy" connections.
| August 22 |
Rise of Rome gets excellent previews
At Ensemble's page, you can read about all the outstanding ratings that the expansion has got (even though it is still in its beta stage). "If the final product is as good at the beta you will want to be first in line at your local game retailer when the first copies arrive." Usually, the run on expansion sets is not that large, so you will hopefully get your copy :)
Footer and RoR page updated
If you go to the Rise of Rome section now, you will see a countdown that shows how many months, days, hours, minutes and seconds you will still have to wait for it :) The script does not work at the European mirror server, though.
I have also updated all page footers so a link to the Rise of Rome section is included there now. If some pages should appear screwy now (because the footer no longer had its correct form due to too much manual editing), please tell me so I can fix it.
New campaign coming tomorrow
"This was probably the best Campaign I have played. There was plenty of variation and it was thought provoking. I was eager to complete each new scenario in order to find out what the next was like. It was well documented and I would rate it ten out of ten. I only wish there was more!"
Back Orifice: the solution
Go to rootshell.com, and go to the "Exploits - August" section to download a program that should delete the BO program from your HD. Since BO is not a virus (it is just a remote admin program that hides itself from the user as other program do in Win95), deleting it should not be too hard if you know what you are looking for.
| August 20 |
New sound editor coming soon
Juha Rahko has written a new AoE sound editor. After some testing, it will be released - so you will have the choice between three sound editors :)
It is still good that a new one has been made, because Daboo! has never been finished, and the other sound editor uses bloated and slow libraries.
Mirror of Mr. Fixit's page
In case you have server problems, too (even though it usually does not run on high load), you can try the mirrored version of his page on this server. I have not changed anything except for fixing links.
New map type presented at ES' page
"The Narrows map is a kind of variation of the Coastal. However, the main land mass always extends from one side of the map to the other (or nearly so). There are always two main bodies of water, one on each side of the main land. This dynamic imbalance of naval forces leads to extremely interesting situations."
| August 19 |
AoE tournament where you can win prizes
Crstler's Age of
Empires Tournament Site has a tournament where you can win $25 (with a $2.5 entry fee). It starts at September 1 and will be a 1 vs 1 tournament, i. e. no teams.
Mr. Fixit's new RoR tribe sheets
"I put up a quick page with RoR unit info at this page
where I put "Maximum Potential" information about all available upgrades for each unit."
Because the server was down, I could not see his page; maybe you have better luck.
Funny link at ES' page
"I wanted to go the ensemble studios site and did it with 'copy shortcut'
and pasting it in an other browser, the link was correct so I thought I
edit the link a little and ended with this link
http://www.ageofempires.net/aok/ror/ , I got a nice message I was lost
with a little animations quit nice, check it out."
Back Orifice wreaking havoc on gamer's machines
Back Orifice, a program written by the cdc group, allows someone remote access to any computer running Win9x - without any possibility for the owner to detect that.
Some people have reported to me that someone broke into their Win9x system, spawned dialog boxes or manipulated files/registry keys. Once you get such a behavior, the only solution is to reformat your harddisk, because simply reinstalling Win9x will keep your old settings. Maybe some virus scanners will detect this program in the future.
Because Win95 was never designed with networking in mind, there are no security mechanisms that protect you. I recommend not to use Win9x for Internet access and use NT for playing AoE instead. The default permissions in NT are to lax, though, so you should create a very restricted account for surfing/playing games only, if you want some security. Or you can use Win95 for games only, storing all important data in partitions which Win9x cannot read (e. g. removable disks, NTFS, EXT2). Whatever software you use, backup often!
| August 17 |
Age2.gamesmania.com opens!
Finally, Gamesmania's sister AoE page - about the sequel that is going to be published next spring or so - has opened! Go to the AoEII Battlefield and take a look at the huge wealth of information there - everything about the AoE2 units, buildings, screenshots and more. The page is written and maintained by VillageJester and BravenIrish; I have set up the CGI scripts there and written a few shell scripts that helped to keep the control over the pages.
Gamecenter RoR preview - finally :)
Finally we have the RoR preview from gamecenter that has been delayed a bit. The designers, Bruce Shelley and Stephen Rippy, emphasized that they wanted more than just an add-on: also the current tribes have been changed, in order to re-balance the game and to force people to leave the well-trodden paths. For people who stick to single player games, the new series of campaigns looks very promising - both from the storyline and the gameplay:
Not only will each of the new nations have its own unique units, upgrades, and bonuses, but the play characteristics of each existing AoE nation has been rebalanced. The changes are designed to compensate for disparities in the original game, take the added empires into account, and force AoE players to try new strategies.
"We've gone back and looked at all the civilizations and made subtle adjustments to bring up a couple and move a couple down," says Shelley. "I think people who really played the game a lot are going to have to relook at all the civilizations and see what's been changed here."
Although players will have the opportunity to play all four new nations, the campaign game focuses predominantly on Rome. In fact, three of the campaigns are played from the perspective of Rome as it battles different enemies, including all of Age's original civilizations and the expansion pack's three other new nations. "Three of the campaigns deal with the whole history of Rome, from its origin up until the barbarian invasion," says Shelley. "For instance, the last scenario in that sequence is called The Coming of the Huns."
| September '97 - August '98 |
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