Whilst the Vox instructions provide a good guide on how the buildings work, and what they do - there’s a shortage on details as to what the best guide for actual building placement is.

I hope to give you a good starting point for Resource building placement. The general information on where and how to place buildings is covered in the Vox instructions.

The Basics - Building Classes

There are two classes of buildings -  Military, and Resource Gathering.

Military buildings are rather simple - they can be built, for the most part - almost anywhere that is either within your sphere of influence, or neutral (unclaimed) territory.  The placement of these should be closer to enemies, or likely attack vectors.  Because they do not impact upon the production of a tile, you do not have to consider their placement quite as much.

Stockades should be used to provide automated defense throughout your territory, and as a first line of defense.  

Resource Gathering buildings, as the name suggests - gather resources which you can use to fund your empire.  This is what the main part of this guide will cover.

Selecting a location for your Resource Gathering building.

Location, Location, Location. Yes, Location is everything in this game, if you want to get the optimum resource gathering capabilities from your land.

All resource buildings have a Production Area. For first level buildings, this is simply the tile they sit on. It is when you start upgrading buildings that your positioning really matters. 

Here’s an example of inefficient building placement:

This is a typical beginner mistake - Sure, at first this provides a small boost in efficiency, however the majority of these buildings cannot be upgraded. In addition, those that can be upgraded will be less efficient due to a different, or mixed resource availability on some of the tiles.

Here’s an example of better unit placement: 

All buildings have a two-tile gap between each other, which means there is no impediment to upgrading to Level 3.

There are some problems with this placement, however. 
For instance - Mines can only produce metal on Rocky Hills (preferred), or Scrub Hills (only partial efficiency). 

All of these mines have been placed on the edge of the Rocky Hills, and thus will only have partial efficiency when upgraded.  This is because the production area will expand onto Plains, which has only Food production capability.

This is an example of significantly more efficient building placement. All buildings have atleast a 1 tile gap around them, and have 2 tiles between each building meaning all can be upgraded to Level 3.

Most buildings have full efficiency, only the mine has partial (due to being next to a Lone Mountain).

Of course, some times it is not possible to get nine tiles in a square that are the same resource type, or you’re forced to use Scrub Hills. This is where Outposts come in handy - since, unlike Farmsteads, Mining Pits, and Logging Huts can produce resources of any available type.

Outposts are especially handy when you have access to Mountains and Blights. Once upgraded to Settlements, Towns or Cities - they can produce Relics and/or Gold very quickly. 

Handy Tip: You can build directly on top of blights for an additional boost in your relic production rate.

Gold Ponds are the best source for gold - be sure to place a few workers on it to increase the gold production.

Small Islands are also excellent locations for upgraded Outposts, as all water has a certain percentage of Gold in it. 
Update: As Christina points out - these are also excellent locations to build Stockades. These give an additional defensive capability, they also help to control more territory (which means a higher score).

Just watch out for the Velociraptors, as they are known to hang around small deserted islands such as this.

I hope this little guide has been useful. Feedback/Comments welcome.

Did you know:

• Velociraptors hunt in packs, and are known to form an equilateral triangle around its prey.
• Velociraptors can accelerate 4 m/s², with a top speed of 25 m/s on open terrain, 10 m/s while wounded, and 10 m/s in indoor laboratories.
• Velociraptors can open doors, but are slowed by them. They can open an initial door in approximately 5 minutes, and will take half that time for each subsequent door.
• Velociraptors do not know fear.

If not, you should visit www.velociraptors.info for some home safety tips. 

It won’t save your life, but it may give you a few more minutes of utter terror whilst the raptors are eating your slower family members.

Oh, and go get a No Raptors shirt whilst you’re at it.

This is bizarre… more wacky stuff happening in the UK.

Great picture of the doomed pigeon over at the Daily Mail.

More detailed story over at the Times Online.

And, ofcourse, someone taped it and put it up on Youtube. 

This probably isn’t one you want the kiddies to see…  

Update:
As Venu points out below, and Paul pointed out to me earlier today, the Wordpress Plugin wp-lightbox will do this for you (plus install the Lightbox code for you).

With some pointers from Paul Jenkins, I wrote this plugin for Wordpress that will automaticly add Lightbox code to linked images. It’ll also go and copy the alt tag from the image as the Title for the URL - so Lightbox will show it as a caption.

It’s not fully tested yet (it’s on this site, though).

Situations where you might have some difficulty:
* Large linked images (i.e wider than the browser/screen dimensions)
* Images linked to non-images.

However, it’ll only add the lightbox code if there’s only an image wrapped in a link — it won’t add it otherwise. As a crude hack, you could insert a space, or anything else to break the insertion.

Additionally - it won’t add (or more correctly: will remove itself from) entries where you’ve manually added lightbox code or title values.

If you’ve got a better approach than the three pass filter - please let me know (I’m no regex guru).

Without further ado, here’s the code - save it to a .php file in your Wordpress plugins directory, and then activate.

<?php

/*
Plugin Name: Lightbox Auto-Add
Plugin URI: http://will.hughesfamily.net.au/20061026/wordpress-plugin-automatically-add-lightbox-code-to-linked-images/
Description: Automatically Adds lightbox code to linked images.
Version: 0.4
Author: William Hughes
*/

function lightbox_autofilter($content)
{

// three-pass filter... 

// first, go and add the lightbox code everywhere needed...
$content = preg_replace('/<a ([^<]*?)><img ([^<]*)(alt=”([^"]*?)”)([^<]*)><\/a>/i’,'<a rel=”lightbox” title=”$4″ $1><img $2$3$5></a>’,$content); 

// now remove any duplicate values that might have been added (eg: if lightbox code was already added by someone)
// purely for HTML nice-ness. 

$content = preg_replace(’/<a rel=”[^"]*?” ([^<]*?rel=”[^"]*?”[^<]*?)>/i’,'<a $1>’,$content);
$content = preg_replace(’/<a ([^<]*?) title=”[^"]*?” ([^<]*?rel=”[^"]*?”[^<]*?)>/i’,'<a $1 $2>’,$content); 

return $content;
}
add_filter(”the_content”,”lightbox_autofilter”);

?>

Update: I’ve now written a plugin that’ll automatically add the (basic) lightbox code for you in Wordpress itself.

Update 2: Use the Wordpress Plugin wp-lightbox to do all this (and more) for you automaticly.

Well, after a successful test just now, I have to agree with a lot of the commentary out there: Live Writer is actually really cool.

I’m not saying anything new by saying that someone needs to build a plugin for it to enable automagic Lightbox code embedding.

Sure, I can go and add the HTML manually (Yeah, Live Writer actually lets me do that easily enough), but given how slick the rest of the app is - it’s a shame, really that I need to do that.

The addition of drop shadows to the photo by default is interesting, but I’d prefer that it remembered my last selection (Photo paper, in this instance).

C’mon, don’t make me do it… *whine*

Oh, and yeah - you can customise the HTML, but that’s only specific elements - like URL, or Image, etc - not a combination of them.

 Meanwhile… here’s more photos (just ’cause I can)

This is really just an excuse to test out the Windows Live Writer thingy… seems  quite nice, acutally.

Some of the pictures I took from the recent Scrams.org meeting.

Update: Use the Wordpress Plugin wp-lightbox to do all this (and more) for you automaticly.

Paul mentioned installing Lightbox today, and I decided to give it a go. I had heard of Lightbox before, but never thought of actually installing it on my blog - it’s fancy Web 2.0 stuff, and it surely would take a bit of effort to install, plus I’d have to stuff around with it for ages to make it work correctly. Well wasn’t I wrong… Seriously, it took less time to install Lightbox, and test that it worked, than it did to write the above portions of the post. Really. Steps for Wordpress (quick and simple, customise as desired): 0. Download Lightbox 1. Upload the content of the Lightbox zip file up to your wordpress directory - or - the root directory of your site (I chose the latter) 2. Open up wordpress directory/wp-content/themes/your current theme/header.php in your favorite text editor. 3. Insert these three lines somewhere between <head> and </head>:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”/js/prototype.js”></script> <script type=”text/javascript” src=”/js/scriptaculous.js?load=effects”></script> <script type=”text/javascript” src=”/js/lightbox.js”></script>

(nb: If you installed lightbox in something other than the root directory, insert that in the src values above - eg src=”/wordpress/js/prototype.js”. I recommend using absolute links, rather than the default “relative” links given by the script, if you use virtual permalinks - i.e like I do: http://will.hughesfamily.net.au/20061025/lightbox-is-cool/) 4. (Only if you use the virtual permalinks) a) Open up /js/lightbox.js, and do a replace “../images with “/images (there’s two instances of it) b) Open up /css/lightbox.css, and do the same replacement (theres three instances this time) That’s it. Really. At most 2 minutes, if you’re on dialup, and type with two fingers. Now, For each image thumbnail you insert, add a link to the full size image, and put rel=”lightbox” in the anchor tag - so to get get an image to appear like so: I would change this code created by Wordpress when I insert an image:

<a class=”imagelink” href=”http://will.hughesfamily.net.au/(snipped)/no-surfing.png” title=”Chatting after catching a ride.”><img id=”image115″ src=”http://will.hughesfamily.net.au/(snipped)/no-surfing.thumbnail.png” alt=”Chatting after catching a ride.” /></a>

to

<a class=”imagelink” href=”http://will.hughesfamily.net.au/(snipped)/no-surfing.png” rel=”lightbox” title=”Chatting after catching a ride.”><img id=”image115″ src=”http://will.hughesfamily.net.au/(snipped)/no-surfing.thumbnail.png” alt=”Chatting after catching a ride.” /></a>

Very cool… I can also do series too, like so:

<a class=”imagelink” href=”http://will.hughesfamily.net.au/(snipped)/no-surfing.png” rel=”lightbox[seriesname]“ title=”Chatting after catching a ride.”><img id=”image115″ src=”http://will.hughesfamily.net.au/(snipped)/no-surfing.thumbnail.png” alt=”Chatting after catching a ride.” /></a>

..for each image. eg: Full credit to Lokesh Dhakar, who created Lightbox - it’s a very very easy to use set of scripts.

I’ve mentioned a few times before that I play Vox Imperium.

Today I joined a new game within Vox, and right above my base is … this:

(click the image to open full size - Yeah, lightbox is cool - more info soon)

It looks like some sort of elephant-cow hybrid to me… freaky.

What other bits of hidden imagery (intentional or not) is out there?

No, I’m not talking miniature or remote control tanks. I’m talking full sized tanks*, firing giant paintballs.

Go read the article: Weapons of mass decoration

Scott - I say we do this instead of the golf day next year.

* = technically they’re APCs with turrets, but it’s close enough for me.

Vista - Kinda Cool
Windows Mobile Device Center - Kinda Cool
Windows Media Player 11 - Okay (Much better than anything after Media Player 6)
Podcasting - Kinda Cool

Mix ‘em all together - and you get a whole load of problems.

Juice doesn’t work - as I mentioned before, so I’ve been using Doppler to get my podcasts. It would be OK if it wern’t so damn buggy and non-responsive. They seriously need to learn the meaning of “background worker threads”, or at the least - “asynchronous interface”.

Doppler chokes on the Battlestar Galactica directors commentary (it won’t sort by release date, and thus keeps trying to download the commentary from Episode 9, Season 1), and has other random b.s going on with it. Their interface is also truely crazy. To get feed details, you click on them. To remove something from the queue, you err… double click on it. Then it asks if you want to add the item to the history… wtf? No…. oh, wait… now the damn thing is being downloaded again. Argh!

Juice runs once under Vista, every subsequent time it just dies for some inexplicable reason. (It’s not admin rights, I checked that).

So… someone find me a decent, sane piece of podcast fetching software.

Features Required:
- Downloads enclosures from an RSS Feed (i.e downloads podcasts, vodcasts)
- Imports/Exports subscriptions from OPML.
- Can save them to a directory
- Has a sane UI

See, not so hard, is it?
Niceties:
- Automated downloading
- Queueing of podcasts to download
- Simple rules for automatic fetching
- Easy to add something to the queue, and remove it.
- Tag/Rename based on feed details, if empty.
- Export feed notes etc to a html file that sits alongside the podcast. *

Big Bonus points for it all running on a PDA running Windows Mobile 5. (* If running on a PDA, keeping the HTML and showing it while playing back the podcast would be ultra neat too)

Now, on to Windows Mobile Device Center - it’s kinda cool, but it doesn’t have any automatic media sync stuff that was present under XP with ActiveSync 4.2 and WMP 10.

Windows Media Player 11 is also missing the customisable playlists that display things based on rules… i.e only show items _x_ days old.

end of rant.