Reporter: Silent Hunter
Don't forget to read in More Details. Now Mehul has posted some of the changes for the next age there!
Reporter: Silent Hunter
The Utopian Era of Magic will come to a close at the end of the day on Monday, July 23rd. Shortly thereafter, the game will be restarted for the next Age of Utopia -- more details on changes and the starting dates for the next round will be available here over the coming week.
Mehul Patel
Reporter: Silent Hunter
Alot of details has been posted by Mehul in the public forum you will find them Here!
Reporter: Silent Hunter
Initial Things to Look at:
For this coming Age of Utopia, we want to focus on a couple of new areas along with the normal minor changes involving buildings, races, balance, etc. The two areas are:
* Personalities: Many different people have suggesting varying ways of implementing these, but our intent is to keep it very simple and straightforward. When signing up, users would have a choice of a 5-8 personality types to choose from -- things like General, Banker, Politician, Mage, Thief, Healer, etc. Each would provide a bonus of some sort, and we'd like to make these unique where possible. For example, a Thief might have increased gains from thievery ops, which no buildings/science/etc can provide. The specifics haven't been worked out, but the bonuses would be relatively small to start out.
A second possibility here is that users could change their personality at any time during gameplay. However, bonuses would increase over time (but start at scratch when you change personalities), so a player that keeps one personality would get far more bonuses than one that changes every few days. I haven't really decided whether we want to go in this direction or just keep it simple.
* Reducing the effectiveness of cheaters: A couple of significant ideas have been floated around over the past few weeks. One, random-kingdom-numbers, we have little to no interest in, because it complicates the game beyond what we want. It would help reduce cheating, but at a significant cost to gameplay, simplicity, and user-friendliness. The Kingdom/Island system is an easy-to-remember designation system that really organizes the game for both us and the players.
Another proposed idea, however, could work, albeit less effectively. The idea is basically creating distance between islands -- attacks from Island 1 to 4 would return more quickly than attacks from Island 1 to 12. (Mages & Thieves would use more Mana/Stealth for farther away kingdoms) This would also work to help encourage kingdom by reducing the breadth of random attacking.
The details behind all of these ideas are still being developed, but we wanted to go ahead and start getting feedback on them and get user input.
Other small changes we're considering include: (this list is NOT comprehensive or definitive -- just a collection of some notes I have here for possible changes, this round or in the future)
* Intra-kingdom attacks would be a bit faster
* A Crystal Eye would show a kingdom's relations
* Inspire Army may also reduce training time a bit
* Fool's Gold may be more powerful
* The plague would be stronger and spread more
* Possible addition of "Ally" as a relations type
* Adding spells that have both benefits and drawbacks
More will be posted later as we develop more of these ideas.
Mehul
Reporter: Silent Hunter
Moderators
There is an Moderator in the public forum who is banning people for no reson.
Resenty there popped up many threads about this in the forum mostly in Utopia Strategy. And everyone who critisized him got banned, so even me (Silent Hunter) and a friend (Grim Swede) for posting about my bann..
All the threads was also deleted and no one knows who it is. As for my bann i know who it was and i know it's him who is banning everybody else too, but i won't mention any names since i'm not 100% sure.
As for now i'm getting this when i try to post "You are not allowed to post here at this time." and i don't know for how long i'm banned...
Reporter: Silent Hunter
Mehuls Post:
As most of you know, this age will be coming to an end later this month. Our plan right now is to begin discussing areas of change this weekend, with an intent to end the current round about two weeks from then (around the 20th or so).
I'm not sure if we'll be doing major additions or staying with relatively minor changes at this point. We do plan to look at the Personality system as one our top priorities this age, but outside of that, nothing has been determined yet. More will be posted this weekend as we start looking at the possibilities.
Mehul
Reporter: Topwolf
Well guys, what did you all think of this round? Kinda better than last round, but yet, I feel it was still not long long enough to do much
Reporter: WoD
This is WoD reporting... Been a while :-)
Well lets see what BoU can do... I have not known that they wanted war with WoD, but if so, than lets go. WoD is NAP with RAT, and so we shall fight side by side.
Reporter: Da WANG
Da WANG here reporting in
:o)
Did you know that BoU is trying to War Rat and WoD? Only problem is BoU has absolutely NO power or organization
Reporter: Silent Hunter
As some of you may have noticed the framed ad display is not working. Here is Mehuls post:
As many of you may have noticed, the standard framed ad display is currently not working. We have temporarily disabled this system as we make some adjustments to the advertising setup. We expect to bring back the Framed System option within about 4 to 5 days. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Mehul Patel
Swirve Games
Reporter: Silent Hunter
Think your province is safe when you have logged out?
Wrong, Anyone (if your on a public computer) can just press Back and then Refresh and click Retry on the popup message, And they'r back logged in on YOUR province. And can do anything they want.
Solution to the problem is just to close the browser, But how many do that on a public mashine?
Reporter: Silent Hunter
Do you whanna know where most of the Kingdoms/Provinces in the different alliances are located in BF? The go to http://andman.dhs.org/kds.htm. There are 31 Alliance locations there.
Reporter: Wolf Pak Leader
Well everyone, it looks like in the BF the biggest prov. is the halfling, and in the WoU it's the undead.
If any of you would like the big undeads ICQ, please contact me at: 103035552
Reporter: Wolf Pak Leader
Unfortunatley, AA is saying that their war with BLADES is a lie. I am trying to get more on this.
Reporter: Wolf Pak Leader
AA declared war on BLADES yesterday evening, more information on this will be updated soon.
Reporter: Wolf Pak Leader
Well guys, how do you all think you are doing? I was on vacation in Hawaii, so I couln't report anything, but I was playing my account while there :-)
Hope you all have a good round.
Reporter: Wolf Pak Leader
Well everyone, the new age is here, so get cracking on organizing your kingdom. What do you think of the new round? Going to be fun? Or boring? I think this round will be well balanced :-) Good luck all, and have fun.
Reporter: Silent Hunter
The Era of Magic has Begun!!!
Here is the changes and some other stuff by Mehul:
• Era of Magic: Dates & Times
• Era of Magic: Gameplay Changes
• Era of Magic
Enjoy!
Reporter: WoD
WoD alliance is coming in full strength next age, so get ready, and join soon, more info soon to come.
Reporter: Wolf Pak Leader
The AA / ROME war isn't so simple. ROME has these people helping them: WoD, BoU, URF, Shiar and SS.
AA now stands alone in the fighting. After BoU joined many others followed. With the pullout of AA's help, they are left to defend against all of these. BoU has ended all their other wars and is concentrating soely on AA now.
Will anyone join AA in the war? More to come.
Reporter: Wolf Pak Leader
I hear the semi-famous WoD alliance is coming back full strength next round, I don't have many details at this moment, but will soon have interviews with the leader. Aany information would be excepted.
Reporter: Tang
Something I forgot to add.
I could never have done all that without my kingdom mates. I've got lots of former monarchs with me in my kingdom and the best would be to learn humbly from them, and modify it to suit your kingdom.
Reporter: Tang
Let me not bore you, but just some simple history. Together with cooperative kingdomates, I organised a semi-ghetto into a T50 kingdom this age, all while having fun=)
1. Kill of people who aren't participating. Inactives and Unactives who can't contribute are far better off being somewhere else. No matter how much effort it takes, it eventually pays off(at least in my case).
2. Have a strong grasp of diplomacy. Have a core group who will support you with difficult decisions within your kingdom. As for diplomacy with other kingdoms, being firm while flexible is how I work, and so far it has saved my skin a million and one times. Never back down to threats and be honourable at all times. If your kingdom is strong enough, have an all-retal policy, even if its just ops.
3. Have a goal and work towards it. Our initial goal was to be top of the island, but with 2 super kingdoms residing here, we switched it to being within T50. We are one of the four kingdoms to have a foothold in land, nw and honor this age, and it encourages my kingdom mates to play even harder.
4. Have fun within your kingdom. During Christmas, I sent each and everyone of them a small present to let them know how much I appreciate them. And when I was the first to log in this age, I spammed the forums and gave them a good welcome, starting 10 threads.
5. Make forums fun. Have contests or taverns which would entice people to post more. I find as my kingdom grows, people tend to visit the forums more. I can find 4-6 new posts every hour=)
6. Talk to your kingdom mates on a personal basis. If you become friends, its more likely they'll put more effort into their province.
7. Organise your kingdom to have enough thieves. My kingdom has never been declared on this age, except for a 4 way fiasco and I feel its largely coz we've got a good arsenal of thieves.