A few weeks ago we of the crimson got sieged at a ridiculous time. (5 am on a weekday) and with the help of friends from the clans of Snailparty, Liandi mining corp. , and others we won that siege.

Following on it’s heels was a siege by the now “Ballz of steelzz” alliance from the clans of Mental disorder and House of Errents. Thinking us a weak target they sieged us.

Before going into details on this, one should note that The Crimson Uprising is, always and formost, a clan for new players to find a home in, so when we get sieged and asked for a “fair and equal number” siege, i just have to laugh a little inside.

wel, on to the siege.

The clans dropped a siege on our city and from there went to destroy our walls. they deployed a brigantine in the waters just outside and did considerable damage, destroying quite a few walls and keeping the city under a strong lockdown for 2 hours.

Near 11 pm GMT the Evil Orc Alliance (EoA/Snailparty, liandri, etc..) came in to assist us and was paid 100k for their effort.

just after midnight the lockdown was broken and wile the city had lost all but 5 of the required wall pieces  the enemy was dead and their ship was taken. We repaired the few buildings we could (as you can not rebuild walls during a siege) and went to bed.

during the night HoE and MD showed up with 12-15 people (4-5 AM) and destroyed the remaining 5 walls.

Now, to make matters worse, they had place 3 heavy siege stones, each of those had twice hte HP of our city stone and with our walls down this was not looking to be good for us.

With Elrina, Reidar and Iron working all day to prepare i did all i could to tell the truth of this upertune siege on the forums from the office. so, evening arrived and just 3 hours before the siege i started talking to the leader of their side, our convesation can be found here. where he posted the conversation after requesting it be a private conversation. it’s really a enjoyable read all around.

That said the timer was ticking and friends had flown in, we were with about 30 people and so was the enemy. this though was not a good thing, becouse we had to destroy x6 the ammount HP they had to… provided we even defeated them in battle.

So I did the last thing that i could and sent out word to Speed Lovaah, hiring Chocolade rage to assist. they came, ripped through the BoS alliance members and wile they were in the middle of the battle the timer ticked out and TCU, EoA  and friends went to work on the siege stones.

the siege was very costly for both sides, but victory was absolute for TCU. may it serve as a message: TCU may not have the sheer numbers or characters many veterans clans do, but we have determination and resourcefullness. we dig in and Punch back. always.

Not 15 minutes after the siege on Aerngardh was won, Velmune came under siege again by Lux Arcana.

Fast forward a day and Lux arcana was defeated for a second time, though TCU and friends were ready to defend, it was not un-welcome when a roaming back of Cairn alliance (Sun) smashed Lux Arcana before we could. Oops. it seems luck wasn’t with them.

Well, suffice to say TCU was drained after 3 sieges so when a few days later Lux arcana went at it again (with  3 large siege stones!) TCU officers came together in a meeting that lasted well into the night and decided all these opportunist sieges were just detracting from our goals. The helping of new players.

So the next day we send word out that we were selling Aerngardh and refused help from friends to assist us for the velmune siege. and let it drop, the next dat we sold Aerngardh.

Now, our story does not end here. it’s where it begins.

TCU has been in talks with Sun about buying erinthel, Sun did not desire to sell this city for any price. but we came to a compromise of TCU living in erinthel with sun. which is where we are now, lush on the mainland elflands, living in one of the most beautiful cities there are.

On a seperate note, construction on a secret wonder is started.

A Year of darkfall…

i planned to post this on the 26th at 8.54 GMT, to truly make it a new year post but fate conspired against me and i have just now finished writing this. so here it is.

How it started

Litle more then a year ago, i was one of 30.000 people hoping to get a beta invite for Darkfall, debates raged left and right on the forum about every aspect of the game (before the game was even released!) and all of us caught up in the frenzy only fueled our own hype.

It was often said that darkfall needed no marketting pre release, it’s rabid fanbase made enough hype. And it was true, when information was released about a impending beta in august of ‘08 the ammount of forum registrations exploded tenfold.

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It’s been a long time in coming, but i’ve finally found the time to be bored enough at the office to write this down.

Your first week in darkfall. Now, as there are plenty guides out there to the basics and how to you should bank often, do tittle quests, etc… this guide is more in relation of my clan and the first week, you as a new member (and player) should work at.

this is going to assume you play 2 hours each day for 5 days and 6 hours on the weekend.  For a total of 22 hours over the course of a week. This also assumes you are in ventrilo, ask questions and are actually playing and not afk gathering.

Now, on to the actual guide. we will assume that you don’t have anything at all and are a fresh new player logging in and joined the clan a few hours after joining the game.

Firstly there are 3 things you need to do before you can do anything else.

- do your new player quests, kill goblins and get the following 3 things.

• Change Leafblade (default weapon)  into 2 hander of choice for 20 gold at any of your cities NPC vendors.
• Buy a second new player weapon for 100 gold, the dawnstaff.

once you have done both these things you are good to go into the world at large. after buying both you should have done your first few quests and spent 2-4 hours in the game already. know how to cast a spell, rest, eat food, and command the basics of the interface and gameplay.

now you join TCU and the first thing you do after logging into ventrilo is make your way to our hamlet or city. You can find them both on your worldmap (marked with a Yellow shield).

Once you arrive, which shoudl take between 5 minutes, and 45 minutes, you can bind there and the clan will get you geared and sorted for the first few play sessions and you can head of with a newbie staff and a few weapons to hunt.

Now your first goal after reaching the holdings is simple – get the launch spell.

You do this by casting Mana Missile, Heal Self, and other Lesser Magic spells until you have 70 lesser magic. The reason you want to get this is that along the way to 70 you will get Mana to Stamina, Stamina to Health and Health to mana, which will be among your most used spells. You also get heal mount, which is the only way to heal damaged mounts.

So you go out (with one/more of us) and cast spells, shoot arrows and slap monster for a few hours. going by the 2 hours a day, you will need 2 days to get 70 lesser magic. buy launch and in 2 days after joining the game you can now raid cities. well done.

phase 2 is a bit more complex and requires a group.

Go to our city (via Bind-Kick) and join a group going tot the dungeon near our city. Now, you need 4 things, all of which the clan provides. 500 Arrows and a Fire bow, 10-20 food and a staff to cast Heal Self and stamina to health .  Now, with a group you can train your archery and lesser magic as well as greater magic if you buy it quite quickly – and you get a bunch of loot for your trouble.

The trick is to stay out of range of the mob spells wile the veteran members take the blunt of the damage and dish out damage with your fire bow. your 500 arrows should last ye the better part of the 2 hours, and combined with food, respawn timers and looting you should be between 25-50 archery and 70-90 lesser magic as well as 1-25 greater magic.

this will probably take you to 50 archery in the next 2 days and that means that 4 days (8 hours) after joining th clan – you have both launch and 50 archery, and around 5-10k in loot, weapons, armour, reagents and some other tidbits as well.

Now, we’re 4 days later and on the 5th day we start with phase 3.

This is the one where you actually do your melee, and for that you need to go solo, hence the need to have trained up your basic magic a bit so ye can heal yerself.

Take your weapon, or three, and head on a troll, akatar, goblin or kobold spawn. Fellow members can show and probably guide you to it  where you can take of and start the melee madness.

Remeber to cast Heal selfs, mana missiles, other lesser magic spells and some greater magic in between as you get loot. bank once in a wile and keep doing this untill you have 50 of your chosen 2h weapon. this will probably mean day 5 and yuor 6 hours on day 6.

by this time you should quite capable of joining in with the clan in many events and be no better or worse then many others. day 7 you should start your focus on your chosen path, but that is outside the course of this guide.

the few most important things to remember are:Focus and concentrate. A lot can be done in a short time with the help of a few clan mates – so ask and be prepared to work for it.

yesterday Paragus got back the answers that were sent to the developers a short wile before. The forums have been A-buzz on the various tidbits posted, though two main questions keep stocking us with “when”.

so, because of the various in accuracies floating around the forum, lets see what we can read between the lines.

Read on beyond the break for a long dist of dissected answers and questions.

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Well, here we are in the new year, it took me a wile to find a way to write this and not make it sound like i’m a storytelling old geezer on the porch of his ranch… i failed and thus here is the story.

Just before Christmas ANG and French Kiss started harassing our city by parking ships outside it and bombing our walls, nothing serious was destroyed except a few walls and some repair shards used. This unprovoked attack on our holding though prompted us to search allies who we could count on and who could assist us in the times our numbers were low.

This gave us the allies of Duckjob Trolls and Foreign legion. Both have given all they could to defend our city from attacks.

So, Armed we stood waiting as Christmas passed and Uqtu got sieged, our city got attacked, new year came and went and we mostly just held on by tooth and nail and hoped that our enemies were also out celebrating the end of the year, and not the end of our holdings.

All well and fine, we stand in January… and we still got (most) of our city.  So, logging in on Sunday January third i took a look at our end-of-year casualty list and was pretty saddend. out of our 32 members, we had lost 12 over the holidays to lack of time, lack of interest, burn-out or just simply people who didn’t fit in with the rest of us.

Down to 20 actives we started a agressive recuitment campaign for the first week and got our numbers back up to 40, which we hope to hold steady and slowly increase once again.

So, in the first week of the year we got a few new neighbors, namely Perkele. who’s sole delight was to destroy our city for no other reason then having died in pvp. wile there was little we could do against ANG due to their numbers and strength, we were not going to let perkele sit on us.

For a few days we sat and defended agaisnt numerous raids ranging from ship and raft attacks, overwhelming numbers and hours of naked camping. TCU being TCU we just dug in and kept coming, killing them as often as they killed us. until finally we had all the power and resources ready we needed and went to pay them a visit.

Entering the town they lived in we pushed, killed and as a showing that we dont sit still against wanton aggression, destroyed their guard tower like they had done to ours. There after we banked our loot, and left the town. since then perkele has raided us, but their initial big-bully attitude  has been curbed into the pvp-neighbor we enjoy fighting. TCU may not have the best PvPrs, but we’ll be damned if we ever stop,  surrender or even think of giving up.

Licking our wounds of the week of intense fighting and repairing we set to quickly builing back our stock and bought 2 new brigantines for the clan to replace the one we had lost in the epic sea-tower battle.

Also since a week TCU owns a new hamlet,  the hamlet of Velmune which our own Riddik Flesheater wished to buy, and did. So yestereve, as a gift to our allies duckjob trolls, we gave them our hamlet of Unelak. May they use her well!

So, where does TCU stand? in the same spot we always: Plowing on! We are looking for new people to fill our ranks and fill our ventrilo with laughter and chatter to fill our city with bodies and to fill the flesh of our enemies with arrows.  So if ye be thinking we are the clan ye are looking for dont hesitate, we dont bite… often.

As shown before, we used to own a ship which we lost in a epic battle. Which was totally worth it.

but, in the last few days our enemies (and enemies of everyone) have been attacking our city with a ship. So far the damage has been broken walls, damaged buildings and 2 cannon towers lost.

Now, one might wonder, why we are not fighing back and the reason is quite simple. The two times they attacked us, it was well past the time we have people available to fight in sufficient numbers and each time they run away before our allies can move in to assist us with the defence.

So, it seems our enemies are cowards but still want to feel special. well done to them, they destroyed a few hour of work from our side and ran away from a fight.

that said,we wont let it rest on this and will retaliate, the question is how. and for that we have a few surprises up our sleeves for them. Suffice to say that all i wish is for the to mount a attack at prime-time during the weekend.

A few days ago i was talking to a friend and he asked me if i still played darkfall. I said yes (obviously) and him knowing my total lack of commitment to games asked me how in all hells i was doing that when the game had so much bad publicity and problems assaulting it.

I really couldn’t give him an answer beyond ‘it’s fun’. so i went and started thinking… Why am i playing darkfall? It’s not for the communitie or in-game friends (most of those quit/never started!), nor is it for the graphics or animations, story or roleplaying….

So i went and made a list of the good and bad things and why i play darkfall.

Firstly is the Non Instanced Open World, Full Loot, Open PvP. See, i started playing games when i was 11 years old, I found a copy of Ultima Online and got swallowed up in the world of the game.I spent days in the Britain sewers fighting Giant Rats, weeks at Moonglow fighting the Mongbats before ending up 3 years later rich as fuck collecting Rare objects and making millions of gold weekly on trades.

And it’s that quality of the sandbox game that first drew me to darkfall. The ability that I decide what to do and when.  A Few weeks ago i got a mail from FunCom (Age of Conan) for a free 2 week returning player thing and double Xp, etc…

and when i logged in the game i noticed a few things which had me log out again within the hour, So allow me to do a comparison of an hour in Age of conan and an hour in darkfall.

Age of Conan hour:

• Do Daily Villa Quest for money
• Go to Guild City instantly
• Mine recource node closeby by looking at my minimap – maybe kill a monster that shows up out of nowhere.
• go to pvp zone and kill/get killed a bit ..
• repeat

Darkfall Hour:

• Check City nodes for recources, mine/lumber/farm a few minutes and bank
• check with clan what is happening
• ride out to a mob spawn and kill a few mobs, maybe meet a player and kill him and get the loot
• ride back with loot and bank it
• ride out again and kill more mobs, maybe get ambushed, maybe get a peacefull farming session.
• ride anywhere else in the world without restriction.

now, on first sight this seems about the same, but somehow one is more interesting… why?

Mainly the Risk and rewards involved. In Age of Conan you die, rez and run into battle again. In Darkfall you die, rez and have to regear and ride out again, your gear is lost if you die.

And it is this risk which makes darkfall much more exiting and draws me in so much. i can spend hours hunting the same mobs in darkfall, where i get bored after minutes in other games. why? becouse in darkfall i can get ambushed at any time, i am activly hunting and even the mobs can suprise me.

where as in games such as Age of Conan i click a few buttons and even if i die – all i need to do is run back.

so, that aside i went looking further: surely the risk of losing stuff isn’t all for darkfall.

And it isn’t.  Combat is the major difference for me in this aspect of the game – Darkfall’s combat is much more dynamic, much faster and much more involved. And due to the fact that if you die you lose your items: it’s that much more intense. And this is also the major reason i am not playing EVE online, wel the other major reason is eve’s skillgain system but the combat is the major reason for me. the slow and relative “calm” combat in eve makes me bored.

In EVE the adrenaline comes from the fact that you get blown up and wile darkfall has the same: darkfall offers a very intense experience wile doing so. it’s just that much more involved, and that makes it fun.

On the other hand are Sieges, Large scale PvP (200-800 people at once), the Meta-game Politics, skill based system,  trade and transport mechanics, etc… but more games have those, and yet: I am playing darkfall.

Onward… what else is there that makes darkfall stand out for me?

wel, the only other aspect that really comes to mind for me is the open world where i am not limited to certain areas or unable to play with my friends untill i’ve finished grinding or any other of a thousend small things that annoy me in games with levels.

Though there is plenty that annoys me in darkfall: Naked Griefers, Lack of Economy, Balance issues, Macro issues, (past) expliots.

so really… i cant say what has me playing darkfall for hours and hours on end – no other game does that, all i can say is: try it, the link is to the right of this page. if you are even remotly interested in a open world and sandbox mechanics, you’ll definetly want to try darkfall.

Wel, it was bound to happen. We got sieged.

It was around 7PM (CET) when Raged and KDS ran into our hamlet and Raged dropped a siege on us. They used a Shard Holder and send him of to a floating island in the human lands.

We gathered all our available members (10 of us) and rode to the island with the intention of getting up and killing the shard holder. we got there and tried to get up with the elevator.The elevator works in 3 fases. First phase is strait up, simple enough and safe enough as the island is above the elevator and you cant get hit there. The second phase of the trip is a straving upwards curve until you are under the “exit” platue. this part is the first danger, as you leave the safety of being under the island and are on a small floating disk where your enemies can now see you.

Phase three is strait up again, ending the elevator ride. Between each phase the elevator stops for a few seconds before moving on.

The hard part was the pause between phase 2 and 3 where we were in clear view and range of most spells. we tried getting up to the shard holder about 15 times. First unmounted, mounted, a few people at a time and try to get more of them off the ledge by using spells. We met with little success and ended up 3 hours later when the second group of enemies attacked us.

many of us died and we regeared at the hamlet.

It was clear to us now that we were outnumbered, and out gunned (most of ours being returning players or new players) so we called in help to even the stride.

the Under Dog alliance quickly proved to be true to their word and showed up with 30 people. this brought the defenders to 43 people against the enemies estimated 25. We quickly dug in and waited out the last 40 minutes of the siege when we got word taht the Real Estate Agency got hired to attack us. Bringing in 28 more people gave both sides evenabout numbers, but character and player experience was vastly on their side and we got destroyed in short order.

Just before we got destroyed we attempted a snipe on the shard holder when they moved him back to Long March, which sadly failed.

The hamlet had gone vulnerable and we’d gone to defend it, the hamlet was lost 30 minutes after becoming vulnerable to Real Estate agency. I think we all learned something from this siege, be it that Floating islands are bad or how a siege is like – lets all use this knowledge to our advantage in the future.

I’m sure all of us are exited for this with the expansion now scheduled for the 24 period of 3d/4th of december we have exactly 1 week left before it hits us.

So, in preparation of the patch we are all working on our goals and plans.

• Clan Guard Tower, this one is our clans collective goal and we are slowly making the 500 required modules for it. it will take us a bit of time and we dont have all the recources yet, but we are getting there.
• Personal Skills, some of us are coming close to mastery skills, get training magic up quite well. the main goal is to develop out characters, so if yer not hunting, be mining , chopping, refining, crafting, etc… lets keep this flow going

With the expansion day being a bit fluent in time (up to 24 hours needed) we have several options on what we can do. Though depending on our amount of members online at server up, we will probably try to take out the brigantine and see if we can find one o those sea villages. or we’ll just ride around the world and see if anything has changed monster wise, test out the new skills and view the inevitable “updates to the world”.

we’re all exited on this end of the spectrum, and darkfall is looking good for itself and as a clan, for us. also, to note the new siege mechanics have been posted on the official darkfall forum, so run over there and read up about them. it’ll be good to know them.

PvP in Darkfall is, of course, constant. But some encounters stand out more then others, be it due to the fun of them, execution, exitment or just becouse it was enjoyable.

Yesterday evening was a exiting day for the crimson uprising, as we had begun our money raising campain by massivly taking villages, so far we’ve taken 12 villages for a grand total of over 32.000 gold, not to bad a income for a clanbank.

We started right after server up and recalled to a house, where we found another player with the same idea, who we quickly killed and helped ourselves to his work.

First village down, quicly we rode to number two and took that one down as well and the recalled to our hamlet to take number 3.

Here the first part of today’s real PvP happened. wile we were hammering the stone, the clan ANG with two of it’s members arrived to the scene and kill the two of us. they took the village. wel, what does around comes around eh?

so we moved back to our city, geared up and moved out to a village close to there. Lucky, none there! third village taken. the money had already moved in by now and we noticed that our thee villages got us a combined total 1100g per hour.

Our fellow Arotheja was hammering the village he has a house in by that time and that ticked village number four for us.

by that time we got more people and started our daily gathering, hunting and messing around and lalter that evening, when villages were about to go vulnerable again (6 hours after being taken) we rode out again and took more villages. by 8 pm (7 hours after restart) we were up to ten villages, giving us a nice hourly income.

So, the income secure we went to train and here is where today’s fun enters.

wile we were in a dungeon training our characters on monsters and getting some wel deserved loot in return one of ours said a enemy was coming inside the dungeon.

naturally, as we were 4 and he was alone, we engaged…and got butchered. So hearing he was overencumbered with all our loot and that he had logged out we quickly regeared and gathered around the location he was logged out.

he logged in,  saw us  and logged out again. repeat 5-6 times before he ended up triggering the login bug and falling through the ground so he could get away.

two of us quickly repeated and both did it at the first try and as such we jumped into the unknown below the world after him. he had logged out agian, but this time he was still in the world… without invulnerablility shield. quicly killing him before his timer ran out we took back our loot and his.

That only shows: persistence works. never give up.

Soon after he and some buddies came to our city, but as we were not there we send a kind tell asking them not to litter during their visit.

We also had a different kind of raid on our fair city… 4 players who had equal characters we did. great fun as our newer players finaly got a chance to fight and not just fly around burning in flames.

Another pleasant suprise was the player Lawsy Maximus. A player leaving for the Na server has generiously given the clan bank a fair ammount of items to use, so thanks be to Ye and the best of luck on NA!

all in all a fun night.

ps: screenshots coming later.