Honor's Code

I continued playing the same game. After wiping Germany and finally restoring my Civ I learned a couple of things. I think what I was supposed to do was to either raze the German cities or set up puppets. Then after I set up puppets, one by one, annex the cities. If you build a Courthouse building in the occupied city, then it eliminates the unhappiness. Because happiness is a Civ wide trait, you let your other ‘happy’ cities outweigh the unhappiness in the one annexed city until the Courthouse if built. Then you annex the next city. While under puppet rule, you still get all the resources, you can’t control what they build. The game is down to myself (as Japan), George (USA), and Darius (Persia). Darius ended up building the Apollo program in 1973. He’s well ahead of me now. Because he has built Apollo, he can start to build the Spaceship for a Science victory. If this game works like past versions of Civ, the only way to stop him is to take his capital. I’m going to try a risky str

I decided to try my first game. This won’t be a play by play of each turn, just some cool stuff from my playtime. I chose the Warlord difficulty which is one below the ‘Normal’ difficulty of Prince. Small map, Continents, 5 other Civs. I chose to play as Japan. Japan’s special skill is called Bushido, and their special units are the Samurai, and the Zero. The Samurai is a good unit in the early to mid part of the game, and I’m hoping the Zero is a nice advantage during the latter stages. Bushido allows your units to fight at full strength, even when damaged, and it sounded very appealing to me. I knew with a Continents map there would be a couple of large land masses and a couple of smaller ones. Each large landmass would have 2 to 3 Civs, and several City-States. One land mass would be a small island nation. I wound up on a large landmass with 2 other Civs, George (USA) and Bismark (Germany). I took over the eastern part of the continent, while Germany took the west. This hemmed in

I spent a little time last night trying out my new toy, Civilization V. I won’t call this a review, merely my impressions from my first play session. The first thing I figured out was my old strategies were not going to work. In previous versions of Civ, a core part of my strategy was micromanaging my science rates, and stacks of doom. A stack of doom is basically a whole lot of units moving together, something I brought over from my Risk days. You can’t manually control the science rate any more. It is simply a function of your population. Only one combat unit can occupy a space, so you can’t make stacks of doom anymore. This also means you can only station one unit in a city for defense, but don’t think for a minute that it makes cities easy pickings. Cities are units in and of themselves, and it is very difficult to take them out. You basically have to lay siege to them and bombard them with archers, trebuchets, or cannon. Cities fight back and bombard you units as you are attack

What are we going to do today, Brain? the same thing we do every night, Pinky… Try and take over the world!

Now we’re in the home stretch. My 4 favorite Bosses in World of Warcraft to tank. #4 At #4 on the countdown, we go to the ancient halls of Ulduar, and the Spark of Imagination. One of the great tragadies of Wrath’s design is that if you weren’t around when Ulduar was current content, you liklely haven’t seen it. It, and Naxx, have been relegated to the same level as pre-Wrath content. It’s a shame because there are some really cool fights in there. Fights like Mimiron. Mimiron was a 4 Phase fight, and my favorite part of it was that your job as a Tank changed from Phase to Phase. In Phase 1, you tanked a mini-Flame Levithan (an earlier boss). This phase tested your cooldown usage, and for Paladins who lacked a second cooldown at the time, it tested your coordination with your healers for external cooldowns. In Phase Two, there wasn’t really anything to tank, so you whacked on the boss which looked a little big like a Tie Fighter. Then in Phase 3, you did some add tanking as the r

Welcome back to our countdown of Honorshammer Top 10 Favorite Bosses to Tank. If you missed part 1, you can get caught up here: Part 1 . #8 Coming in at #8, we have our first entry from Icecrown Citadel. You’ve seen him grow up from just a wee bag of parts to one of the toughest abominations around. Here’s Festergut. Festergut gave tanks the rare opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to the DPS portion of a fight. Early on, when the ICC buff was low, Festergut’s enrage was a challenge for some guilds. He became something of a brick wall. Tanks relished in the opportunity to help their guilds beat that enrage timer. The way the fight works, in case you haven’t seen it from the Tanks perspective, is the first tank gets a stacking buff that increase the damage you do. Once your co-Tank taunted the boss, you dropped your threat stance (Righteous Fury for Paladins), popped cooldowns like Avenging Wrath and went to work making your ‘pure’ DPS sweat bullets as you assaulted th

Today, we’re going to countdown my 10 favorite encounters in World of Warcraft to tank. The first problem I encountered working on this post was I had way too many nominees. So I cheated. Well not really, its my blog, my rules. Basically, I combined a couple of similar bosses into one entry, since what I’m really after in this post is what made these bosses fun from the tanking perspective. But before we get into the countdown, I have to find Casey Kasem to DJ for me. In the meantime, let me give a brief one sentence mention to the Bosses that didn’t make the cut. Consider these Honorable Mentions. The Twin Val’kyr – I love the whole Light and Dark aspect of the bosses, it reminded me a little bit of Hydross. Four Horsemen (Level 80) – The way you have to trade off the bosses, and trying to maximize threat to burn one down while staying alive. Leotheras the Blind – Paladins had some unique advantages against this boss and exploiting those was fun. Hodir (Hard Mo