PBM From: wbock@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Bill) Date: Tue, 22 May 1990 01:06:49 +0000 So, how may people out in netland play these games? EPIC and Legends are by Midnight Games out of Medford, Oregon. I'm currently playing Epic and I'm looking forward to Legends. For those not in the know, Epic is a medieval, fantasy, empirebuilding, powergaming, etc., etc., and a couple others. It's much fun with 7 or 8 position types, lotsa troop types, several racial types (with more not available at startup), hundreds (supposedly) of magic items and artifacts, and more features. From what I've been told Legends is NOT a roleplaying version of Epic. It is, rather, an extremely magnified 'upgrade' of Epic with a lot more detail on characters, skills (each with a guild that can be built anywhere to aid in training, player creation of magic items and much more or (again) so I've been told. As a bit of background, the game of Epic I'm in is IX. I started about a month or two after IX was started as a Nomad Clan Chief. This is my second game of Epic and I was told that the Nomad is a pretty good position for beginners who don't want to blasted into immediate non-existence. I quickly gobbled up a lot of surrounding territory and now have the highest position power rating of the alliance I joined (at least I think I do). The alliance has 8 or 9 members, apparently but as it's young and the game just started last August (snail, remember) we haven't formed any sort of newsletter. A lot has happened to my position but the two I'll mention are the Artifact and the Overlords. The artifact I got several turns ago is called the Talisman Of Avalon. I'm still not sure what it does. I deactivated it in a province and the City Level (affects gold production and trading) went down by 3. I'm hoping (praying, actually) that this means that one of the 2 or 3 powers of the artifact is to raise CL by 3. If this is so then I'll have a real good chance of taking over a Maratasen (tough as nails player-race) Overlord (tough as nails dudes) province with an amazing (for this point in the game) CL of 10. Once I own that I pop in the Talisman and have my very own CL 13 province. Since the maximum CL in the game is 15 and raising CLs costs more and more I'll be able to quickly get to CL 15 by earning dough, deactivatin the item, buying a level at the reduced rate and reactivating, repating once. At I'ma hopin' and aprayin' that thisall'll work. The downside, and the reason that PBeM will probably eventually wipe out PBM, is the game's cost. The maximum is $15.00 a turn and it took me only 10 or 11 turns to reach what's turned out to be an average of about $14.25 a turn. And then there's time. Turnaround is a minimum of 2 weeks and waiting for the next turn can be a pain. Finally, in a recent post someone compalined about Midnight Games basic irresponsibility and dishonesty. I've never had any of the problems this person had although one of my turns was processsed 4 days late. I've only called the company 2 or 3 times but they've always been courteus. I ask questions and make comments on all my turns and almost always get responses (the exceptions are when I ask for exact equations on how combat or wizard blasting work) which are always polite. On the other hand I do know about how they've said repeatedly that they would have the rulebooks to Legends ready 'any day now' and all I can say is that I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they're trying their best. A Dios, Bill Bock Cal Poly SLO My opinions are. 2 Profits = #tradegoods * 5 * (distance) * (1 + trade bonus) ---------- 200 Referenced By Up