Soo…. ages ago now, I switched from playing Eve to playing World of Warcraft.   Now with the next expansion coming up in the next several months, talent previews are starting to show up for classes.    So far the Druid & Rogue previews are the ones I’m most interested in.   I really hope they ship with one Druid talent in tact as it is currently in the preview.   Nothing beats ‘Nom Nom Nom’ as a talent name – pure awesome there!

This quick post is primarily just so I can keep track of some planned talent spec setups for my various characters and setups to compare with some of the other guides as they start showing up as well.

Rogue Assassin Build here

Rogue Combat Build here

Discipline Priest build here

Feral Bear Build here

Ok – I have a thing for the tower defense type web games.  Onslaught is just one of several that I spend a bit of time playing here and there.   I recently came across another great tower defense style game – Gemcraft.

In GemCraft, you place gems on towers to shoot the baddies that are trying to get to your base.   Each type of gem has a different effect on the baddies that it hits, from slowing them down reducing armor and everything in between.  There are eight different gem types in all, and effects can be combined to provide multipurpose gems.  Multicolor gems are not as powerful as the “pure” gems, but there is always a purpose for them.

In addition to pure tower defenses with the gems, you can also throw the gems as bombs on the baddies.  This is a great way to clear out groups of baddies that have managed to slip through your defensive ranks.

Your score on each level is used to provide a rank in the game.  As you advance through the ranks, you get skill points that allow you to upgrade and enhance your defensive abilities.  These upgrades are essential to maximize your score on all levels and survive at all on the later levels.

I have finished all of the levels in the game and I’m currently at level 81, with a score of 240 million.  Played this game?  Post a comment with your thoughts and scores.

Well, its been a few months now, and my little city is still growing slowly and steadily.  The city is currently large enough to have multiple components that need to be built up together.  Due to my neglect, The city is currently in need of industry and transportation.   Of course people help too, but the others are needed more at this time.

Do you have a minicity?  Feel free to link to it in a comment.

I came across an interesting game website this last week.  Take a look at my Mini City!  It gets bigger with every daily unique visitor.  Check back daily to watch it grow.

Rather than spending an excess of time on a bunch of posts about my Eve Online activities over the past year, I think I’ll just make this post a quick summary, and consider this the ‘starting’ point for further posts about my in game activities.

My first six months in eve were spent with the Venus Brotherhood. Overall, this corporation was a good place to learn my way around the game. I spent that time building up skills, primarily on the manufacturing and research side of the game, building ships at minimal profit for the corporation and various other similar activities. As time went on, I got delusions of greatness and decided to start a sister corporation to launch a POS tower in high security space for Venus Brotherhood. As I was raising funds for this process, several things happened that made it evident that I didn’t want to maintain too tight of ties to Venus Brotherhood. Even though I still consider many Venus pilots to still be friends, the lack of leadership while at war was very disappointing, and with the launch of the POS tower, it was time to take my own path in the universe.

In February of this year, I launched VNRI (Venus Research Initiative) and spent approximately 600 million isk to launch the POS tower. After getting a bit of business very early from Venus Brotherhood members and some brief advertising through some of the trade channels, I found out that a friend of a coworker had started an alliance, Empire Research, whose purpose is to provide POS based research slots to alliance members. After a quick vote, I joined the alliance and converted the labs to be available to alliance members. This simplified the process of handling operations and increased tower income tremendously.

Well… That covers most of it. Since joining Empire Research, I have made a sizable amount of money from the POS. Business was very good for the first 3 months or so until the alliance had war declared against it by another alliance, ‘The Privateers’. While the direct damage from this war declaration was minimal, it did cause several customers to leave the alliance. The past two months have shown pretty heavy losses as a result. So far, business seems to be picking up significantly for September, and if losses are posted again, they will be much smaller.

Now that I’m up to date, it will be much easier to provide updates that will perhaps not be quite so long. Well… they might still end up on the long side, but they won’t cover as much ground anyway.

I’ve been playing a wonderful game, ‘Eve-Online‘, for the past year or so now. There really is a lot of variety available in this game, which makes for a game that stays fun for a very long time. Unlike many other MMORPG games, skill training in eve is completely time constrained – skills train whether you are logged on or not, and skill training can’t be pushed faster by skill “grinding” that is common on most of the other games. Training times are affected by character attributes, which can be enhanced with implants and learning skills, but of course those cost training time and in-game currency.

Eve has a number of professions to engage in, including mining, manufacturing, trading, mission running, pirate hunting, exploration, and piracy. Of course, most players engage in some combination of these activities, particularly over the life of their character. PVP is an integral part of the game throughout all areas, including the elements that are not typically thought of as PVP. While “empire” space is generally considered safe, there are still plenty of ways for other players to cause problems.

With this to provide some background, future posts about my in-game activities will make a bit more sense, although to really understand much, you really need to join and play the game. The price is very competitive with other games, and with some work, you can actually pay for the game time with in-game currency. Whether you join or not, you can expect to see regular entries about the game and various in-game activities and events.

Have a great week and I hope to see everyone flying around soon!

I’ve been somewhat hooked on the tower defense games lately. Among my favorites has been onslaught
, which, in addition to the typical features of the tower games, includes multiple tower combos and booster towers. Onslaught has seen several new features recently, including the addition of audio and some new combos. Today adds some new features, including a new ‘super tower’ and several bugfixes.

Strategy:

So far, the best strategies I’ve found have been the ‘nuke flower’ concept, and laser rockets. So far my best game has been played using laser rockets, although I tend to get impatient sometimes and start too many waves at once, which swamps the rockets. The nuke flowers (a rocket tower and 2 cannon towers, repeated a bunch of times around the map) seem to be more resistant to this problem, but unfortunately the nuke damage does have a practical upper limit, which ends up leaving a fixed lifespan for the nukes effectiveness. By chaining the laser towers, the laser rockets can get into massively high damage levels to handle the creep spawn for a much longer time period.

Summary:

Overall, I like the tower defense games. They are fairly simple to play, and have a fair bit of variety. I’m in the process of planning a compiled tower defense game engine. Look for updates on the progress of this project to be coming over the next several weeks.