| Tom is busy, busy, busy! | April 16, 2008 |
| You may have wondered why there was not much happening around here lately. The reason is that there have not been a lot of major changes to report. Tom posted on the Discussion List that he has almost no time to do much in the way of new features or changes to the game: "At this time, absolutely no idea that requires more than two lines of code will even be considered." We hope he is hard at work on War 2.0. In the meantime, some f the election bugs have been fixed. Check the news ticker on the right for some links to the bugtracker. |
| -- Indirik |
| New War Island | April 1, 2008 |
Tom posted the following message to the Discussion List a few hours ago: When I closed down the war islands, there was some protest. From two factions, actually. One, from the strategy players who enjoyed a pure war environment, and from the roleplayers who feared the strategy players would now flood the rest of the game.
So, I've taken some time and re-worked the concept. Remember that my reason was that the war islands never worked the way I intended them to.
Opening later today, there will be a new war island ("South Island"). The map is slightly expanded, but mostly the same. There are now five small
realms initially. Some other features have been changed:
* "War only" as you're used to, all non-war features are disabled, more complete this time
* Looting has been much improved, to make it a viable strategy
The most important change, however, is that I've decided to finally listen to those who want a much more "active" and speedy game. On the new war island, turns will run EVERY TWO HOURS. That's 12 turns in a day, 6 half and 6 full. This will provide our strategy friends with an entirely new challenge, because you really can't expect everyone to be active all the time with that schedule. You will have to plan with inactivity,
something that I hope will then migrate to the rest of the game. Day- and Night-Armies are just one of the ideas that hit me.
One disadvantage to the whole thing, however. Since the rapid turns would, in theory, allow people to leech gold off the islands very
quickly, the war island is a one-way road:
* You can't leave once you're there (no emmigration)
* To prevent overcrowing, everyone is mortal on war island (same as for heroes elsewhere)
* No family gold sending
I have a few final touches to finish, such as uploading the new map and resetting the database, and then later today you'll read a second announcement when it opens.
– Tom
As just about everyone has guessed, this is almost certainly Tom's April Fool's joke. A lot of people were very enthusiastic about it, though... |
| -- Indirik |
| Scouting Sea Routes | February 14, 2008 |
| The ability to scout across sea routes has been removed, to more accurately simulate the reality of the situation. You can no longer scout across sea routes unless you are traveling across the route, and are more than half way to the destination. (There was an initial bug in the code that let you start moving, scout ahead, and then immediately turn around. This has been removed. You now have to be at least halfway along your route in order to scout ahead.) |
| -- Indirik |
| Happy Valentine's Day! (And Battle Organization, too.) | February 14, 2008 |
It's been a while since our last update, so we thought we'd toss this one out. It was discussed on (where else?) the Discussion List a couple weeks ago:
On testing, there's been a new column in battle reports for a few days now: "Org"
What it means is "Organisation". This depends on several factors, the most important being army size (the more men you have, the harder it is to organize them) and whether there's a marshal (or second) issuing orders, since the army is _the_ organisational unit for the military. Army will make a huge difference.
Leadership skill and a few other factors will also change it.
Starting tomorrow or whenever I update the code next, this will have actual effects. Low organisation will mean that your disorganised army is scattered around randomly. Some units will start a row too much to the front or back, or wait longer than they should, or even fight in a different formation (though the chance for that is low as long as their commander has a bit of Leadership). Also, morale of the entire army will suffer a little.
In other words: Manual setting of row/style/formation by general commands will be less reliable and less effective than using the armies and marshals for, well for what they are there to do. You can yell "front/aggressive/line" as much as you want, if there's nobody there to organise the men on the eve of battle, there'll be chaos.
– Tom
|
| -- Indirik |
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| April 16, 2008 |
| Bug 4186, Bug 4207, Bug 4210, Bug 4221 - Several bugs involving election and appointment of realm council members, pretty much all on Dwilight, have been fixed. |
| March 5, 2008 |
| Bug 4111 - Second-in-command of an army will no longer use the Defensive marshal settings when they are the attacking force. (Fixed on Testing islands.) |
| February 14, 2008 |
| Bug 3746 - Infiltrators visible in scout reports and region pages has been fixed. If your infiltrator has enough skill, they should be invisible again. |
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