News Archive - Oct 2007

The PBEM community is all fired up about the Shadow Magic PBEM Olympics starting in the 2nd week of November! With interesting and completely new adaptations of FFA and team games mixed with elements from other genres (like Capture The Flag and Domination), the tourney is sure to be a blast!

Here's a chance to represent your country in this epic tournament. Sign up here and fight for your honour and country!

(By Enginerd)
It was just over two years ago in September 2005 when Enginerd faced off and beat Gill to claim the Wizard Ladder Champion title for a record 4th time. Nojd the great took his title from him once and the mighty Sprout took it away from him twice… but those two had retired… Who would strip the title from him this time? Many tried and after 17 successful victories Enginerd was finally defeated.

A special map entitled The God who will be Defeated was created by an expert mapmaker. This map was designed to challenge Enginerd as he was the God referred to in the map title. A tournament was initiated with this map where 5 players Challenged the Champ. They were all beaten but one of them came back for a second try. It was the mapmaker… who knew the tricks of this map better than anyone and set about a plan to not only beat the Champ but to dominate him! These two had faced off many times before but Enginerd had always been victorious. This time was different….

All hail the new AoW1 Wizard Ladder Champion… Arctic Wolf.

Round 2 of the PBEM-singles tournament has ended, and the third round is about to begin for the remaining four contestants. The ones that will battle for a place in the finals are:
Costa vs Krakatur
Swolte vs Henrysix

These matches will take place in the Human Valley, a world originally created by Philip Wille for AoW-1 (and refined by Artic Wolf, I understand). Using PawelS' map converter, it is now playable in AoW-SM and the tournament organizer (Enginerd) is busy balancing it for tournament play!

Over the last year there has been a lack of maps submitted to the AoW1 downloads section. All this changed during the month of August when many mapmakers put forth a tremendous effort and produced a wide array of maps. Close to 30 total new maps were created including a small single player campaign. It is truly amazing!!!!

There were three categories for the competition: Single Player maps, Multi Player maps and Rookie Mapmakers. And the Winners Are:

Gandalf the White and his SP map Finbar’s Quest
Dan Petersson and his MP map Greyhawk’s Adventure
Jetrall wins the Rookie Award for first time mapmaker with his MP map Race to Glory

Honorable mentions go to Artic Wolf for 3 fabulous maps in the top 5, Skout77 for a close 2nd, Dan Donnard for LOTS of maps and Codius for his campaign. All the Mapmakers should be applauded for their efforts.

Click here for all the results and offer your congratulations, or click here for a list of the maps in the tourney, or click here to go to the downloads section.

Mods are 'hot' these days. As you can see in the discussion here, The Stranger has released a beta version of a new Dwiggs mod. The changes are ready to be tested, so please download his file (see the top post) and provide feedback. I am sure he can't get enough...


The mod contains structures and units never seen before!

Personally, I am also very happy with the naming going to 5.0. No more confusion with our v1.5 patch. Here a more elaborate v1.5 sneak peak, since we almost seem to forget...