I think we are in the middle of a three way competition for 16th place between us Arnor and Viraxian Ascension. Let the Ecstasy of PanGaea's Enlightened Self-Love and Spiritual Hedonism prevail!

As Eradicus takes a moment away from from his busy life to glance at the universe and ponder "What does a man have to do to get a moment to relax and have some fun?"
He also notes the struggles by his comrades and hopes to join the fray in a couple more weeks.

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We look forward to your return Eradicus. You are currently PanGaea's greatest Overlord and a respected member of our senate.
You held the fort here admirably during my prolonged absense, and your troops are no doubt having a well earned rest throughout the Cooperatives pleasure worlds and Party Palaces...

Well, I submitted a medium tough last night (my first win at that level), but so far my score hasn't changed and neither has PanGaea's game count?

Sometimes you need to press the "refresh empire data" button on the empires page to force it to update. I've done that and we've added 3k to our score.
[Message Edited]

Cool.

One thing I've been noticing playing on the harder levels is that its quite tough keeping up technologically, prompting me to trade techs a lot more than I would in a 'normal' game (I try to avoid it if at all possible).

This has led to me noticing a weakness in my game that I will need to rectify if I continue to play at harder levels. Basically I need to learn to keep techs to myself that have trade goods and wonder improvements attached to them, until I have built them. The problem is, I can never remember which techs enable such things and whether I've already built them or not!

I'm sure the last game I played at 'tough' level could have scored a lot higher if I not traded the techs until I'd built the improvements.

Unfortunately I kept trading them with the Carinoids, who proceded to beat me to it on a number of occassions. The fact that I later captured the improvements didn't seem to matter...

Greetings, PanGaeans. I was thinking about you guys in history class the other day. The professor mentioned something about Peter The Great and drunken orgies with Germans and said that some historians joked that that was really what got Peter interested in adopting western ideas. So I thought "Hm. Convincing other civilizations to adopt their culture with wild parties. Who does that remind me of?" And then, because I was tired and his voice is sleep-inducing, I spent the next fifteen minutes or so thinking about what kind of political party bonuses a government run by PanGaeans would get. Here's what I came up with:

"'Life is a party' is the hedonist's motto. While they don't get any economic, industrial, or technological benifits, life under the Hedonist's reign is quite a bit more pleasant than under any other party. When they're in power the people are 15% happier and reproduce 10% faster (don't ask). The hedonistic lifestyle is also quite attractive to other civilizations, giving them a 10% bonus to influence."

When the Hedonists lose power, the party ends and the morning after begins. Morale drops by 10% (Because really, even if you don't like them as a government anymore, how could you really be happy under someone else when you've lived under the Hedoinsts?) Holding their throbbing heads, the people make the usual vows to never do this again (-20 Loyalty). Other civilizations see this loss of power as proof that hedonism can't work as a form of government, and lose respect for the humans for trying it in the first place (-10 Diplomacy, -10 Influence).

http://www.cs.rit.edu/~pjw9720/hedonists.party

So what do you think? Is it a party worthy of posting in the Library? I thought I'd ask here first, since it was inspired by you guys.

~SDC~

That's a great idea, Peter! I'm sure the PanGaeans will love it!


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That sounds like a great idea....you know you almost sound like a closet Pangaeanist yourself!

I think there's a little Pangaeanist in all of us. What I'd like to do before submiting it to the Library or Lord Megatron's mod site is give it a proper logo. "Misc02" just doesn't capture the spirit of the Hedonists. Anybody know how to go about making a party logo?

~SDC~

He he, that is cool.

I don't know anything about modding, so I cant help with the logo. So far the logo for our empire has had the logo of two interlocking pentagrams. There are some metaphysical reasons for this, and I intend to add a short article to our blog about it at some point.

Anyway, two interlocking pentagrams form a ten pointed star. May I suggest that as the logo if someone is able to do it?

This may actually tempt me to try modding you realise...

Another suggestion for a hedonist logo might be found in a picture of a wine glass (or an ancient greek wine jug), a bunch of grapes, the mythos of Dionysus, or Bachus.

Grapes sound good to me.

Ok, I figured out how to put a logo with the party. I grabbed the logo off the PanGaea Cooperative empire page and converted it to the same format as the party logos that came with the game and seems to work.

http://www.cs.rit.edu/~pjw9720/hedonists.zip

If anybody wants to come up with a better logo just let me know. There has to be a small (24x24) and a large (40x40) version, 256 colors. I have no artistic skills at all.

~SDC~

I might give the logos a go. I haven't actually tried your ones in the game, because I'm on the wrong PC, but I am supposed to be an artist, and now you've provided the correct dimensions and I presume it needs to be pcx files like yours, I could get out photoshop and give something a try...

...give me a couple days though, I'm a bit busy at the mo.

Okay, I've done the logo. In fact I did two. One is a bunch of grapes, and the other is based on the PanGaea logo...

I've put them in a zip file which can be downloaded from here...

http://pangaea.galciv.org/hedonists.php

Anyway, Peter, are you sure you wouldn't like to join us in PanGaea? You appear to be the only active member in Adventurers Inc. Even their emperor hasn't posted a game since the end of October. We are currently role-playing a bit of a party here at the moment...

Hmm, I've attempted to use my pcx files in the mod, but have come to realise that the pcx files I saved from photoshop are 24bit per pixel, whilst those in the game are only 8bit. This apparently causes them not to load properly.

My photoshop is on my other PC so I may have to go back to it in order to sort this out. Ultimate Paint doesn't seem to be able to adjust the bit per pixel...

I used MS Photo Editor to make them 8bit. http://www.cs.rit.edu/~pjw9720/logos.ZIP I think the small grapes logo stands out better on the election screen. The way the hedonists2 logo blends into the background just doesn't look right to me when it's that small (though it does look nice in the large version).

~SDC~

To tell the truth, pretty much the only reason I joined Adventurers Inc. was because I was jealous of all these people with neat logos under their names. And it was kinda neat to see it climb in the ranks when I submited scores. So what kinda stuff do you do in PanGaea, anyway?

~SDC~

Well I can't give the whole game away, because we are planning something in secret called 'Operation UP'. Basically the plot is something along the lines of a secret society descended from the illuminati that controls the trade corporations of a humanity that became more hedonistic and anarchistic politically as technology offered more and more fun.

We are basically evolving a story of our characters and their interaction. Eradicus, currently on a break from GalCiv, roleplayed himself into a place on the 'senate', which is actually a reference to PanGaea's inner cabbal. Kevin the Kitten is also active, but so far has been content to role-play an independent overlord who allies himself to the PanGaea cause but has shown no interest in initiation into the cabal. Not that he supposed to know the cabal exists, heh heh heh, which makes the role-playing more fun.

We have a joeuser blog now, which we use to post stories about our characters and the PanGaea Cooperative. It is linked to from our new Empire Page...

http://pangaea.galciv.org

Neither graphic actually worked when I tried them, so I have redrawn them. What I did was use Photoshop, and just edited one of the existing graphics in the game, saving it with a different name.

The problem was that you have to use the standard colour palette in colour indexed mode for it to work. The previous graphics I did were not even in colour indexed mode, so didn't even have a palette, let alone the right palette.

I will upload the correct graphics shortly...

By the way, I thought I'd make use of both graphics for the mod, by adding in a second party. I want the Dionysian Party to be similar to the Hedonists, with slightly weaker stats, but with some other bonus to indicate the wild pleasure they take in ecstatic violence... perhaps a soldiering or attack bonus?

Do you have a list somewhere of what the different bonus types are?

GalCiv Writer can be used to make mods really easily. http://www.ctuit.com/bill/galciv.htm The annoying thing is that it expects all the files to be in their standard locations (hasn't been updated since the mods folder was added) and it decides where it wants to save the mods it creates. You can just select what abilities you want from a drop down menu and enter an ammount. It also tells you the "value" of what the ability bonuses you give the parties are, though I don't know how it comes up with that number.

~SDC~

Heh heh heh,

in the mean time I've worked out how to do it manually. Modded a party with just one attribute and kept changing its value and reloading the game.

Once I'd found the neccessary values for the Dionysians I created that party. Might load it into the writer to see if its got a similar score. Will do the same with another party I've added called the 'Hashishim' who are meant to be a survival of the old Ismaelian Islamic sect that indulged in narcotic and sexual initiation on the one hand, but had highly dedicated and fanatic spies and assassins in high places all around. I think there is scope here to add a whole suite of hedonistic parties. Well, I'm thinking of adding a fourth one anyway. The Illuminati...

Will just have to do two more graphics!

(Sorry, you've really inspired me with this, I hope others like these ideas and I'm not just getting carried away...)