Towers may be placed in uncontrolled "land control areas" - means in such green areas which do not have a controller in them yet. The green land control areas which appear on the land here and there - more often in the higher level zones which are underused - are available in certain QLs. If a land control area is level 10-25, you may only place a QL 10-25 tower there (controller or guardian conductor or what have you). The higher level land control areas (like in Perpetual Wastelands, Avalon, Mort, etc.) allow for higher QL towers of up to QL 250. Since these areas are quite wanted, there are currently not all areas in the beta yet (that is what is said on Beta Test at least), so hopefully everyone who can afford a tower, will be able to place one. A guild can control a maximum of 5 of such green land control patches. And a guild can only control 1 land control patch of each type (level 10-15 is type I, level 25-40 type II, level 50-85 type III, level 85-130 type IV, level 130-180 type V, level 195+ type VI) the numbers used in the examples here are not accurate, but are used to demonstrate how it works.

So.. a guild can own 5 towers. 5 towers of 5 different types either 1 of each up to QL 200 or 1 of each up to QL 250 without the QL 10 tower. Or something inbetween. All these calculations are done with complicated formulas, as you can see in the tower construction menus. A guild needs to be "powerful enough", you need to be of high enough level, the guild must not already own a tower of the type you want to build (towers can be destroyed by yourself with the "/tower terminate" command - if its your towers that is. If its not your tower, you will have to destroy it... if the gas allows it that is :p).

The notum wars themselves are the fights for the areas. If an area is under attack, the guild owning the area gets a message saying so in the "Org. towers" channel. Each guild owning towers has such a channel, which alerts the guild of attacks on their towers. You can then hop into the grid, look for the grid exit to your controllers (it is 1 exit on the bottom floor near the emergency exit) where you may chose which controller to exit at as soon as you hit the teleporter pad. If you are fast enough, you get to defend your tower (the grace period in these areas is 1 minute btw). If you are not fast enough, you will maybe be fast enough to see how your controller explodes (or one of the assisting towers) and your buffs are gone because of the tower providing the buffs being destroyed. Land control areas which were just cleaned of towers are under certain rules, so that those who destroyed the towers, get their chance to build their own towers (if they want and can). The whole process is rather complicated and you will have to be careful of a lot of rules before you can a) build a tower b) build a conductor or a turret around it c) attack another tower (the gas around these towers changes after certain time periods e.g. it is 100% for the first hour after building the controller, for the whole land control area that is controlled by the controller) d) before you can build another tower in a free land control area after a notum war.

Not to forget in the booster pack, the new vehicles (which are as of now a bit bugged, but this will hopefully be fixed before the whole thing goes live! You will not see many Stilettos on Live, period. Those are extremely expensive and due to the rarity of the cold stones, hard to build. Not to forget that all of the new vehicles have air vehicle requirements or ground vehicle requirements that will make your eyes pop out (maybe that will get balanced a bit more.. we will see). The new yalmahas for one fly a lot smoother than the old ones. While the old yalms fly rather straight ahead, the new ones act more like flying vehicles. Their rear end is a bit slower than the front when steering, so it looks as if you are flying drunk through the world ;) The towers and vehicles can all be bought in the tower shops (of which at least the Rome location has been posted in the Special Shop guide for tower shops here).

Another thing is (not part of the booster pack, but of the next patch), that at least for Bureaucrats, the mezz nanos get an addition to their defensive skill arsenal. "Level". "Level 5%" thereby means, that a monster in addition to nano resist and anything else that might help with resisting a nano, gets to resist a mezz nano a lot more often now when it has a high level. The lower QL mezzes have a really high "Level %" addition. Like Muddled Psyche ("Level 150%"). That means, mezzes are almost useless on beta test at the moment, since this defensive addition makes your mezzes not stick at all very, very often! (the highest mezz was unable to mezz a green level 165 mob in 7 of 10 attempts!). On the other hand.. at least Bureaucrats also get something new, if it gets on live that is: A damage augmentation nano for the droid (which augments the crat pet, like the anima line of the MPs does. It adds to the damage output of the droids, I had a rather low QL one from the superior shop that added 187 to damage. This nano also raises aggro keeping ability a bit). And then there is also the 25s duration XP-Loss Reducer 30%. What this nano does is quite easy to guess: it reduces XP lost upon death by 30%, so you only lose 70% of the unsaved XP. (We will see how useful the nano is...for now i was not able to test it since i didnt see anyone with XP die on test since almost everyone is level 200 hehe).

Another addition are the voices which you can install and trigger with "/voice" commands. As a male solitus, i almost fell of my chair when i heard the voice of my toon... really funny those!!! Then during missions you might hear your team mates beg for help from the doc in a squeaky voice or the tank ordering everyone to evacuate. Adds a lot to the feeling of playing with real people and I am sure we will hear a lot of laughter the first day or 2 after release of the booster ;)

Solitus Male "HELP!"

Atrox "HEAL!"

Opifex Female "RUN!"

All in all, so far i can say that the booster pack is worth the money it will cost. It adds a lot to the game, not earth-shattering additions or novelties, but quite enough to make Anarchy Online a lot more fun. The most obvious reason for buying the booster pack would be to take part in the land control actively by building towers and receiving the skill buffs from them as benefit. In the end, everyone can participate in the fights, so if you do not want to build towers, the vehicles are good if you can afford them and the voices are funny as hell. Not to forget the added "NPC" flying vehicles which fly around in the world - like above Omni-1 a ton of freighters, transporters, big notum container ships, etc. adding a lot to the overall feel of the game.

The next report will be about a fight with a lot of people to claim a land control area (if i get to take part in 1 that is...)

Beta Test Report 2:

The battle pictures and the following Beta Test report have been submitted by a visitor:

Battle pictures:

Towers at night

Omni Controller under attack

Omni Controller burning

Another pic of the burning Omni Controller

Omni Controller exploding in a huge shockwave

Hi there,

you asked around for screenshots and I've taken those that I like most, too bad I didn't have more good battle shots. As single doc with 30 people you don't really have time to walk around and take pictures ...

And here's my 5 cents on the booster up to now.

There's still some bugs around, ater the .15 patch we had some annoying new ones with gridding and warping, but I hope they will fix that and then the Booster will be okay. Towers have lots of Hits, insane evades and parry skill (Control-Tower - Omni parried your attack? How the hell does he do that?) and nano resists (at least there Nano Resist works - my doc has higher Resist than nano skills and he never resisted anything at 50% aggdef). A QL 200 Tower takes 1-2 hours to take down with no other towers / defenders around and 15 Lvl-200 twinks bashing at it. Tough, but I think this is okay, else bases would be falling by the minute.

I hate though that they moved the grids around, especially moving Tir Grid out of the city. Didn't check Omni, but it seems they moved some terminals around, too. Dovve will have some work to put all the tower zones into the map (I hope he will). I'm doing a map myself, but I suck at computer graphics.

The new vehicles are pretty much toys, expensive and useless. If you wanna see for yourself, roll up a soldier (best profession for that) and check it. The Stiletto and Adaga will be used only by highest-level people that have tons of IP to waste. 600 Vehicle Air or Ground is nothing I would throw my IP at. Repainting the yalm would already do it for me, if I had 9 mil to spare, and even that's not the case now.

As for speed balancing: I made a test some days ago. 1200 Air Speed was roughly equal to 2700 ground speed. Strange.

BTW - they allowed a lot of people into the beta that cancelled their subscription. Marketing trick?

And is the "Rebel Clans Events" some hint? Rebels? Do I have a deja-vu? That's Omni-Tek propaganda once more ;)

So long

a visitor