Andreah

Dimension Delta Zeta 17-46, Diego Garcia, Imperial Launch Command Redoubt 14, Meta Command Convalescent Center. "Dame Victoria. I have your results back. Actually, I've had them for some time, but we wanted to grant you more time to recover from your unfortunate experience on the Nemesis platform. The Naval Board approved your actions, of course, and the guilt you felt was entirely natural." "Doctor Evans, please. It was not merely guilt. I had never been in such close proximity before. I felt Ross and Doherty's minds die, and it was my mind's grip that killed them." She hardened her face, and held her will close. She would be strong, and discuss this with matter of fact precision. Her therapists took her through this journey every day. Accept what you did. Internalize the pain. Make it part of you. Know that it was right. Command decisions must be made. Scab the wound over. "They refused lawful orders in a time of war." "Indeed, my lady, they did. You were referred here for recovery convalescence due not only to the traumatic experience of your first command field execution, but also because you had bled into your helmet. As you know, your psiocampus is highly developed, which grants you the extraordinarily powerful psionic abilities that brought you to Meta Command in the first place." The doctor brings a chart up onto the display; a scanner's rendering of her brain in profile, and points to the deep center. "Your psionic organ is fully developed, unlike the normal profile, due to a very rare combination of recessive genes. The reason these genes are rare, is despite the obvious survival value of such powers, other gene expressions which would adapt the remainder of the brain and skull's formation to accommodate its position are even rarer." "Hence, you have consistent intercranial pressure from the presence and development of yours. This has several effects, which you have already been aware, even if you did not know the precise source, including debilitating headaches, susceptibility to tumorous growth, brain distortion and maldevelopment, and shortened lifespan." "Worse, in your case Dame Victoria, the organ is fragile and already has several small tumors about it which are prone to bleeding, and when you exert your powers to the degree you had in the Nemesis Platform incident, you run that risk, which we determined was the source of the blood which was found in your helmet." "Even when you more modestly exert, you will suffer pain from the resulting swelling. I am afraid there is no treatment. All we could do is mask over the symptoms, and as you know that's counter to Meta Command policy. You will simply have to chin up and bear it." "However, I must strongly insist, Dame Victoria, that you refrain from using the most potent of your abilities whenever possible, lest the organ either grow too large for what little space remains available to it, or worse, or rupture in a more significant manner, and bleed you out. This would be bad for you, and represent a very significant and unacceptable asset loss for Meta Command." Victoria nodded, and remained silent, not finding words. "I am releasing you medically, provisionally, for 180 days. Commander Medusa is expecting you at MC-5 to run you through combat readiness testing. I understand there is mission to Kansas in planning, and you are being tapped." Lieutenant Evans rises from his chair, raises a fist in salute, and speaks somewhat more loudly. "Lady Warspite, you are hereby cleared for duty. Service to the State and Glory to the Empire!" She stands as well, returning his salute. "Long Live His Imperial Majesty and Death to the Americans!"

Geosynchronous Orbit over the Equator at 18 Degrees East Longitude Imperial Radiation Projector Nemesis-12, Weaponeering Pit. Victoria stood there, stunned. She'd just killed two men, who'd done nothing more than refuse to kill their own families, and who had been willing to die to prevent anyone else from doing it, either. They paid that price. She'd lept into their minds and snuffed them like candles. And it had hurt. Her head still throbbed like she'd been hit with a spanner. She repeated. "Captain, this is Warspite in Central Weaponeering..." She trailed off, unable to finish. "Warspite? this is Captain Evanston -- where's Ensign Doherty? What is the status over there? The arming interlocks are disengaged! I need that beam energized and on target!" She swallowed, hard. Her vision was clouded, her ears were ringing. Her voice choked, but she pushed. "Doherty and Ross are dead. I'm alone here." She choked. "Replacements are required." "Dead? The Nine Hells; I have no replacements. Damnit! We have bogies inbound! Warspite, take the console. Set condition Alpha, and follow the checklist! Mains will be on line for containment in forty seconds!" Words she did not want to hear, but had no choice but to accept. "Copy." The crew of two in the cylinder was nominal for redundancy and safety, with only a jump seat for an observer -- in this case, herself, as political officer reviewing crew drills when this emergency erupted into their laps. But it was designed to be handled by a single operator. She'd been cross-trained on major crew functions. She could do it. She could open the shields, she could engage the pit injectors, she could set the beam path, she could fire the damnable weapon. Moments of decision. Why was it so hard to see? The orbital battlestation had a crew of ten. Eight now, including her. Sixteen thousand tons of the Empire's greatest Technological Achievements, one of a fleet of twenty, overlooking the face of the entire planet, lofted into orbit at incredible effort, protected by shoals of proximity mines, dragon's teeth, glitter bombs, and piranha darts. Six gigatons of pits, neatly stacked in their magazines, injector rails, containment field generators, blast shield deflectors, and beam collimator arrays. And on that, an almost minuscule set of operations cylinders. Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. Long steel spars ending in auxiliary nuclear-electric power systems, gyroscopic stabilizers, docking points, approach and fire control radars, communications antennae, defense grid turrets. Condition Alpha would open the rad-bay shield doors, lock the magazines to the injector frame, and cycle the injector rails into position. She had to buckle herself to the command chair. It was not easy. Ross was a big man, and his corpse was heavy, and Warspite was a slightly built woman. She worked the panel, and choked off the words into the comm. "Warspite ... Central Weaponeering On-line. Engaging interlocks.... Now." Light blinked, levers engaged, and the whole cylinder rocked and shook as the magazine moved between the radiation shields. This would cost her. She could feel the neutrons from the pits, barely sub-critical masses of super-heavy fissionables, in their now unshielded magazines, bathing her and the rest of the station as it was set into Alpha. The panel glowed green. "Alpha ... mark!" Her status display showed a view of the pit injectors. The pits were there, eerily glowing with waste heat, ready to do their work. She continued on the checklist, her voice choking, blinking furiously to keep her eyes clear. "Injector rails are aligned. Central Pit nominal." "Containment generators spinning now. Full power on demand. Stay with us Warspite, you can do it..." Evanston's voice carried artificial calm. He didn't think she could; she felt he might be right. "Enter the following coordinates into your master panel." He read off geodetic coordinates; 41-43.339N, 12-6.334E; 42-30.922N, 14-17.989E. Accurate to the meter, as if that made a difference. They were in, she read them back, coldly, calmly. Controlling her breathing, blinking over and over. She had to wipe her eyes, but her hands had to stay on the master firing controls. "Warspite reporting Alpha mark. Containment reads nominal. Initiating Beta." The giant station's gyros spun furiously, swiveling the spine of the projector to swing through the pair of coordinates. The arming panel read green. The coding panel stayed red. "Beta confirmed. Ten seconds." Her voice felt more steady, but it was a lie. The radiation flooding through the station felt like pins and needles. Or perhaps it was her nerves fraying. This was not her job. She was the Political Officer. Morale, Discipline, watchful eyes and stern words. Not operations. Not this. A computerized voice spoke. "Command authorization required." On the comm, the captains voice rang out "Evanston, Reginald C., Lieutenant Commander, Imperial Orbital Command, Authorization Pudding-Yorker-Duff-Apples-Wun-Siks-Niner-Johnnie, Confirm." The coding panel went green. Victoria called out. "Warspite, condition Gamma ready!", and the captain's voice returned "Fire." She squeezed hard on the interlocks in her hands, enabling the weapon to fire. Pits began cycling out of the injectors into the firing tube. Pulsing walls of force struck them, compressed them, and confined them. The barely stable elements in the pits broke apart, releasing incredible amounts of energy; High energy protons, X-rays, Gamma rays, even exotic particles. The injection rate increased; the fires of hell itself erupted inside the containment tube. The weapon's axis traversed through the first of the points she'd entered, and the beam collimator's aperture opened. On the ground, the Ravaging had not yet reached this far north. Crowds of refugees were still racing up the road network. Mostly on foot, though many in carts or on motorized transport. Serfs, commoners, lower nobility, everyone. The sky lit up with the northern lights at first, only very rarely seen in this part of Italy. Then the air glowed blue. And seconds later, the world around them exploded. The radiation beam carried fifty Megatons of energy per second, and moved at 10 miles per second. Twelve seconds of continuous rapid fire projection, the longest continuous duration the weapon could be energized, all in the form of hard radiation. The air itself ripped apart into atoms, the ground converting to vapor, a strip ten miles wide and a hundred long across the spine of Italy, burnt to radioactive ash. The Ravaging could not cross this, not for a hundred years. But everyone south of the firebreak would fall to it. All it bought was time. She had done it. And she wanted to die.

If I understood what you did, you should find that the distribution of outcomes by set passes a Chi-Squared test to some level of significance, as should the number of outcomes within each set. And the distribution of outcomes by all possible IO's should fail it. The latter test will be difficult, since there are so many possible outcomes, even with 500 or 1000 trials, you'll have low sample counts per IO. Each individual set's outcome should be distributed in a binomial distribution with a rate parameter equal to 1/N, for N being the number of valid, equally-likely sets that could be drawn.

I was thinking revised teleport would pair well with gravity control; thematically especially.

Wouldn't it be great if most powers had alternative sound effects to customize among, and not just VFX?

That's a possibility, but limiting it to team ... at least it can only be used against a person like that once, and then either the perp would be booted or the victim could quit.

The "incomplete" guide on the HC Wiki is very useful, too. https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/The_Incomplete_and_Unofficial_Guide_to_/bind

I've been in this place, in more than one game community, and suffered for it. Time and reflection lead me to believe the barriers were not so high, artificial or intentional as I thought at the time. Most of those barriers are inside me. They're part of my personality, and they do make it difficult at times. Some are ones I can work on, or even solve; some no, they are too deep, possibly even wired into my brain or neurochemistry. Community is more than just the formal groups we're in, too. It's also how we handle ourselves in public in every other way. In the things we say in chats, our sense of humor or lack, whether we give good advice in help, how we name our characters, what we put in our bios, even if we say nothing at all. Everything. It all has an impact, or sets a tone, and is part of the totality of the community. Some have leadership skills and can adroitly gather up many supporting persons in beautiful organization as a matter of course. For some of us, this is possible, but also strenuous work. For some, like myself, it's the best to hope for to lead a pick-up team for a few missions. I think i'm blessed to be a member of the TF's group, roleplayers, my super-group community, and my circle of various friends. I can never take those for granted, and showing reasonable appreciation and respect for what they offer me is not too much to ask. Could I replace those if I had to? No, not on my own. I haven't the personality traits or inclination to be happy in that role. I would find a lesser place, and even if I was settled and happy in that, I would know what I lost. In self-reflection and self-understanding, we can find the roles we -can- fill well, and do those -- they also build the community who are steady followers, friendly listeners, calm voices, and wise advisors. I have good days and bad. Sometimes I regret things I say or do. Sometimes I even -know- I'm about to say or do something I will later regret, and do it anyway. But I try to be aware of them, and always have my sights on tomorrow aimed up a little bit higher than yesterday.

People will occasionally "take us by the hand", and when they do, it's a wonderful thing we should encourage and appreciate. Sometimes it's the same few people, trying their best to create community and organizations. It's hard work and often goes in contrary directions to the individual desires of others. But in those cases, if we others can't find the serenity to appreciate what we do like, we should strive to build upon those parts, and not try to take other parts we may not, down.

I think it can be a very healthy thing for players to take breaks from games. I've done it several times here, just since last spring. It helps me remember it is just a game, and we're all here, in our own ways, trying to have fun and share community. If taking breaks is something that helps a person, doing it more frequently, and for shorter periods can be good too. I wouldn't want to let stress push me to the edge before doing so.

I completely agree. In my roleplay, history would have diverged a long time ago, before the twentieth century, and even if things were somewhat in parallel, all the details, names, personalities, etc., would be different. My characters don't even recognize most pop-culture references.

I'm happy with the mods just exercising their judgment on this, and not having detailed hard and fast schedules of punishment. For the next month or two, it may be more difficult. But I appreciate the HC servers being a refuge from all that other stuff. There are innumerable other places to discuss those other topics.

Agreed. But you know, people.

I remember people playing this on the MECC CDC mainframe via teletype.

In the distant future, if Mankind survives, the Twentieth Century will be remembered by its two greatest philosophers. Bill Watterson and Ted Kaczynski.

An enterprising player could make a start at this with a series of custom AE arcs, carefully written with respect to existing lore.

I think, if when you do a bank mish from either side, you could set a flag to invite someone from the other side to be the bank robbing villain or robbery stopper hero. I wouldn't use it, but it would be a cool tweak.

You can already do that, this isn't one of his pvp suggestions.

There could be many ways to greatly improve how CoH/V handles PvP, except for one big problem -- most of us don't want to play a heavily pvp-centric game, and many don't want to play a pvp game at all. So let me propose that your PvP suggestions are activated/deactivated on a per-server basis, and that only one server need be a PvP centric one. Edit: just to clarify, I mean the proposed new features that would otherwise tie into, and change, the previous PvE experience would be enabled on the one PvP-centric server.

I've only played a few support characters. They can be a lot of fun, and be useful. But not always in the ways one would expect. I don't play support characters that mainly buff friendly defense. At cap and incarnate content, most everyone is at or near the defense softcaps, and I wouldn't add much to that. On some teams, situationally, sure. It's also incremental help against being defense debuffed. I don't feel that buffing recovery helps much either, unless it's a powerful short term, emergency buff. One might think, but defense and endurance are so critical, surely it's helpful. They're so critical everyone else builds to fix them without support. My favorite support to play is Kinetics. It adds things almost no one can get enough of. Recharge and damage. I add gravity control with that on my current best-built support character, and that gives me some ability to help tightly pack mobs. This makes my damage buffs even better, and can have tactical advantages for the team. And then, there is nothing like double-fulcrum shifting on a packed double-spawn and pushing everyone up hard against their damage caps. I go a little further, and add some utility functions and slot/macro/bind them for rapid use. For example, if someone on my team dies, I want to be able to teleport them to me, hit vengeance, rez them, and rebuff them before we can blink twice. As a support member, I can be more generally alert and have the luxury of watching for such opportunities, instead of needing to be laser-focused on keeping my DPS chain going on the boss/av.

My SR/SJ Tanker generates 3.71 end/sec and consumes 1.49 end/sec, with my toggles running. I only lack for end if I've been hit with some drains. One can also use the incarnate Alpha slot to reduce consumption and increase recovery if things are too rough. But I don't think you would need to if you really didn't want to. The Recovery Serums are a good emergency resource, and honestly, everyone should carry them.

I'm having a terrific time with my Super Reflexes / Street Justice tanker. Easily hit the Incarnate softcap for positional defenses and s/l resistances up over 70%. Endurance management can be tricky; and you need an emergency button for very rare bad luck, or for enemies that really hit the few defense holes you have.

Along this line, and I apologize for straying off the sprint topic, but now an then I'd like a general capability to tone down the brightness or transparency, or something, of everyone else's VFX. I think we've all been on a team at some point where someone has some garishly bright VFX coloring and it makes you want to hide it all. I'm in favor of giving people more options, generally, and I almost always set VFX to minimums on my own characters. If sprint had such a setting, I would use it.

I would like to see more special mobs show up in various groups spawns, especially when they are at higher difficulty or scaling settings. Sappers need to stay. In fact, they should get some survivability tricks. Maybe they can go invisible, and then try to sneak around. Maybe they get target lock breaker with it, and a short range instant teleport, if they're spawned from +2 or higher. Make Malta a tactical challenge!

I have this one for stamina: And this for health: They're pretty basic, and could also include team, dual, and super insps, but I usually keep those for manual use, if at all. I keep these on buttons in my main hotbar, with one empty space between them and my frequently used powers. I put the smallest insps listed on the right hand side, because multiple commands like this are executed from the right to the left. The first one that works, i.e., the insp I actually have in my tray, stops the whole macro. If I don't have any insps, the temp power will be activated. SR, and my secondary, SJ, don't have self-heals, and SR (in)famously sometimes lets some hits through, and they can hurt. So having some sort of knee-jerk / panic button helps a lot.