Zhym

Not quite tabletop, but I was in a play-by-post game ten years ago, during the Interregnum, that was started up by one of my fellow gamers who also missed CoH. The setting wasn't explicitly CoH, but the homage was clear. The setting was Atlas City, some of the major organizations included Arikas Shipping Inc, Chiron Pharmaceuticals, Chocolo Sweets, Poseidon Electronics, Rook Industries, and Supers for Hire. And my Super had a contact: Maurice Feldon. It was a fun game and I'd definitely jump in again. And running it play-by-post (under the 4c system) meant we could create characters that the computer game doesn't support. For example, my character was a robot dog. Here's his background:

Of the three missions I mentioned, the tentacles bother me the least. I'm not sure whether the smoky Cimerora mission or the "war" mission bothers me more; the first makes it hard to find everyone you need to defeat, but the second has more sheer numbers than are probably necessary. (Then again, maybe it's my own fault for always doing it without help, to get the badge. But on the other other hand, it's not like my "help" ever lives long when I try to do the mission with them.)

I love the Dark Astoria arc...for the most part. It's atmospheric, it's epic, and it's well-written. But it has one big problem IMO: the side trip to Cimerora. It's just such a slog. There's the mission where you have to find monsters and hostages in a smoke-obscured Cimerora. Then you have to beat up a bunch of tentacles that aren't really a threat but have enough HP to take some time to kill. And to cap it all off, there's that mission where you have to fight off something like 9 groups of Talons, 4 groups of monsters, and then 3 different groups of Talons all before you can face Romulus Augustus. It's not interesting, it's not really necessary to the story line, and it's not even that challenging. It's quantity of battles over quality. Plus, I could never figure out why the Cimerora part of the story starts with "You must take the Idol of Mot to Astoria!" and somehow turns to "Marcus Valerius will sail with the Idol to the Abyss the end of the world!" And I'm thinking, "That....wasn't the plan, was it?" Fortunately, when you get back to the present, things pick up again. And the trip to Cimerora does set up something important to the story later on. But it seems like the whole Cimerora part of the story could be less...tedious. Is this just me? Or do other people get to this part of the Dark Astoria arc and think, "Ugh. Not this part, again?"

Ki Push. Everything else is fighting for second place.

Your memory or your friend is playing tricks on you. There's no IP entrance to Pocket D (unless it's really, really well hidden). FWIW, you can see all the zones Pocket D connects to by going to Pocket D and looking at the map. All the zone exits are marked.

I'm sure I've seen some pretty good Sailor Moon style costumes. ...but that's probably not what you mean.

This. I do "story mode" a lot, but I usually do it solo because there aren't any merit rewards in doing someone else's story arc. Plus, a lot of the fun of the story mode missions is taking the time to read the mission text, clues, etc., which isn't entirely compatible with the way most PUGs operate. Even if a team runs the missions in "slow mode," that usually means KM, not stopping to read all the text. So for me, it's story arcs solo, then teaming up for TFs, SFs, and Trials.

I've had a weird issue recently where the game locks up (i.e., freezes in place) sometimes when I tab away from the game and try to switch back. Is anyone else seeing something similar, or does anyone have an idea what might be causing it? FWIW, I suspect it's something in Wine 9, since that was updated recently.

That sounds really cool, and I like that you have a "zone" concept. Shame there's no way to implement the zone, but AE is what AE is. However...I have to admit that I started "New Earth Rising" and then quit before finishing the first mission, because:

One thing about that—it seemed like LaunchCat the installer automatically put LaunchCat the launcher in /Applications (unless I misunderstand the various LaunchCats, which I might). Is there a way to have the installer ask where to put the launcher? Not that it matters for me personally—as long as IslandRum keeps working, I'll probably use that.

Thanks! One thing that confused me about this, though. When I extracted the .zip file, it had a LaunchCat app. Running that seemed to install a LaunchCat app in /Applications. It wasn't really clear to me what was the installer and what was the launcher. Are there they different apps, both named LaunchCat? Or is it one that ends up in two different locations?

Yeah, I've struggled to figure out what the "right" way to install IslandRum under limited permissions would be. What's worked for me is having it in a subfolder of Applications (which, incidentally, doesn't seem to have quite the full set of restrictions that /Applications has) with permissions set to have my non-admin account as owner of the folder. The subfolder approach also works well since IslandRum seems to create other folders as part of the update process (e.g., "__MACOS", "old"), so having it in a subfolder reduces clutter in Applications. If I were installing this fresh, I might try putting it in ~/Applications instead of /Applications, to see if that helped. Ideally, IMO, anything other than the application itself would go in Application Support. That seems to be the model MacOS uses. But I realize that cross-platform software can't always adhere to the Official Apple Way of Doing Things. And the whole thing about CoH being a WINE application complicates matters further. Thanks for the fix!

IslandRum actually has a configuration option for where the game files live (it's under Options > "Install Path"). @GM Manga can say for sure, but I suspect there's just a slight bug in the last update that affects what IslandRum does with that setting.

Update for @GM Manga: I installed the IslandRum update manually by unzipping the islandrum-mac-signed.zip file and moving the new IslandRum.app over the old one. Still no joy in launching the game, but: Aha! Looks like the installer is putting the install path in there twice. Here are the contents of islandrum.sh: #/bin/sh export PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin export WINEARCH=win64 export WINEPREFIX=/Users/<xxxxx>/.privatewine USE="-cups" cd "/Applications/Games/CoH" /Applications/Games/CoH//Applications/Games/CoH/wine.app/Contents/Resources/wine/bin/wine64 "/Applications/Games/CoH/hc-bin64\cityofheroes.exe" -assetpath piggs -assetpath homecoming -auth 51.161.76.201 -legacylayout Check out that last line—the path /Applications/Games/CoH/ (which I have set in IslandRum as the game path) is prepended twice. When I edit that script manually to remove the extra path prefix, CoH runs. But when I try to launch the game through IslandRum, it re-writes that script with the wrong path.

No joy from this method, alas. I get the message "Self Update Download failed or canceled." When I tried to install LaunchCat from an administrator account, it installed, but it put the WINE installation somewhere in the administrator account's folders, which doesn't help me run it from my user account. What files does LaunchCat put where? Is there a way I can do a manual update for IslandRum, or an install of LaunchCat, from the command line? BTW, just to make my setup more non-standard, Island Rum doesn't run from /Applications. I have subfolder, /Application/Games, which is where Island Rum and the CoH folder both live. So far today, I've just been playing CoH by opening it from from the command line via the islandrum.sh script. But that will stop working the next time there's a patch. My next attempt will be to temporarily grant my user account admin privileges, try to update Island Rum (and maybe install LaunchCat), then revoke the admin privileges again. We'll see how that goes.

When I tried to log into CoH this evening, Island Rum downloaded updates...and then crashed with an error about not being able to extract the zip file. When I tried to run Island Rum again, it just crashed. So I installed an old version of Island Rum, and let it update everything. This one at least loads and says it's on version 053120241, but crashes if I try to launch the game. So I thought I'd finally install the official launcher. I unzip and get LaunchCat, which downloads wine9.zip then says "Mac Client Download failed or canceled." Note: to avoid malware getting to do whatever the heck it wants, my everyday user account doesn't have admin privileges. With almost all software, that's not a problem: something (MacOS? The installer? I dunno!) realizes that admin credentials are needed for the install, and gives me a prompt to enter them. I don't get that prompt when I try to install using LaunchCat. I don't know if that's because LaunchCat just assumes the current user has admin rights and freaks right out if they don't, or if there's some other problem going on tonight.

I tend not to start kitting out my characters until level 27, when the enhancement sets that scale to level 50 are available. Plus, I try to make most of my characters self-supporting (more or less), which limits how much I'm able (well, okay, willing) to invest at early levels. Until level 27, my characters have to get by on SOs. In the case of my Arachnos Soldier, I started slotting with IO sets right after the level 24 respec, because as long as I had to reslot all those enhancements, why not? So that could definitely be part of the drastic jump in fun level. But I've had some characters who were fun from level 1 (hi, ninja blade stalker and DP/MC blaster!), and some characters who were weak at early levels and gradually got better as they leveled (and I started adding IO set enhancements), and a few characters who were so bad that they never got the chance to level to 24 (I'm looking at you, kinetic combat/regen brute), but I don't think I can remember a character that was painfully weak at level 22 and really quite fun, actually, at level 24. And in the case of a SoA, I think it's because the character at level 24 is actually a completely different character than the one at level 22.

I mean, okay, he's kind of a sexist creep with the women. But the bros? Man, he just wants to hang out, help a dude out, and party and/or bond over drinks. I kind of want a Mission Architect arc where all you do is get drinks at a bar with Dean MacArthur. Kind of a "My Dinner with Dean" kind of thing. (Seriously, though. If you haven't played red side, you're missing out on the Dean MacArthur arc. It's fun and well-written.)

Okay. As they say these days: it gets better. I don't think I've ever seen a character shift so much from tedious at level 23 to fun at level 24.

I started up a Soldier of Arachnos based on this post. So far, he's made it to level 22, so not yet a Bane, and...well, he dies. A lot. It's sort of becoming his thing. Maybe things get better at 24, but 22 is painful.

Roger that. I tend to play my 50s enough that most of them either have Incan or can build it pretty quickly. Taunting, though, is usually just the tankers.

So if I want into the club, I need to bring out my tanker to a Hami. I usually go with the Nature/Sonic defender, because Overgrowth FTW (and because there are few things more boring than playing a tanker in a Hami that already has a full Team 1), but if I can get into a special club...

Hold on a sec. The important question here is—@Oklahoman has a chat channel?

Here's my layout, FWIW. This is on a 24" monitor; the UI elements are fairly large because I have old person eyes. It's a pretty basic layout—the only "major" change is putting the nav menu and map in the corner because it gets in the way too much in the top center.

I tried maxing everything I could, but nothing enabled the Desaturation effects option. Could be WINE, could be my Mac Mini's Intel 630 graphics card.