Browser Based Gaming

[Woelfen]

I played ArchMage quite a bit, it's absolutely spectacular. Some things have obviously been tweaked since the original code was sold, but it's still a great game. Sadly, I just haven't had the time to play much. Have an account, but no active characters for this reset period.

I haven't even thought of ArchSpace in years, but if that is still around I wouldn't mind starting a BM guild on there.

[squishymaster]

Both are just plain awesome games.  The best Archmage game out there is The Reincarnation, very close to the original, gets updated between nearly every set if not every set, and has an acceptable following.  The only Archspace game out there was Magellan Wars though that went down last year with no sign of coming back so HippieHunter's Archverse is back in development by a new group of people so we'll see what happens with that.  If people wanted to mess around in the new Archmage I could probably show up for a bit :)

[De-Legro]

Both are just plain awesome games.  The best Archmage game out there is The Reincarnation, very close to the original, gets updated between nearly every set if not every set, and has an acceptable following.  The only Archspace game out there was Magellan Wars though that went down last year with no sign of coming back so HippieHunter's Archverse is back in development by a new group of people so we'll see what happens with that.  If people wanted to mess around in the new Archmage I could probably show up for a bit :)

I used to play Archspace, back when Planetarium was the number 1 web game. I thought it was great back then.

[De-Legro]

For anyone playing Dave's Galaxy, look around you for new players that aren't expanding. Good chance they are inactive and ripe for taking over, which should net you a nice high level planet. No idea HOW to take over planets, I'm sending an attack fleet out now to give it a go, but I expect it will take several days to arrive.

[Adriddae]

Ha I found KingDante.


He is right beside Dave. To the north west to be more specific.

Ok to find me(vistuvis)


First find Dave.(or any of the planets below)

Then move west to find Dave's planet "Embassy 3"

Then move southwest to find Dave's planet "Embassy 1"

Then continue moving southwest to find Dave's planet "Embassy 4"

Then move up to find Vistuvis. My color is orange and my capital's name is Bazidia.

Note the embassy planets seem to be surrounded by a dashed dark yellow-green line so it shouldn't be hard to find them. I also use routes to remember and to chart the map. Like a made a route and called it "route to Dante". Not that it would be much use because he is very far away but its nice to know where he is.

[Silverfire]

Yes, I thought it was very weird to be placed right next to the designer of the game. I guess it gives me somewhat of a unique neighbor set, because anyone can see me just by clicking "demo". hehe.

Anyway, since Dave's Galaxy seems to have a small following I thought I'd make a new thread just for it, and we can all post in there.

[psymann]

The browser-based games I've played in recent times have been:


War of Empires *****: this remains, alongside Battlemaster, my favourite online game.  Like BM, it is a bit of a one-man creation since it started some years ago, and that one man (Tom in BM, Bhaal in WoE) is frequently around to discuss things and explain things.  It has a smaller playerbase than BM, so also has a everyone-knows-everyone community.

It has no roleplay at all, but the strategy and tactical options are fairly good, and one of the most impressive things is that you can do your battles and attacking when you're online - no "Your troops will arrive in 7 hours" stuff - which makes it immediate and more fun.

If you're the sort of player who likes the battles in battlemaster, but not the messages, and you find you have lots of extra time to play more games, you might like it.


Cantr II ****: played this for a fair while, and it's the most similar game to BM I've found.  It's a similarly slow pace to battlemaster, is centred around roleplaying (more so than BM, really), and involves roleplaying normal people rather than nobles in a similarly kind of mock-medieval era.  It's a bit slow to get going with, and the roleplay is all first-person stuff (ie you're talking to people in front of you, like a sort of roleplaying chatroom), so nothing like the third-person Roleplays we have in BM, or long narrative stuff, or even letters.


Tribal Wars **: Gah, that was a horrible game.  The sort of game you can only do well in if you play all day and also in your sleep, and if you are willing and able to drop everything to make sure you send your troops at between 0 and 400 milliseconds after 14:05:34 in the afternoon (I'm not even exaggerating).  Fabulous game if you live on your computer; horrible game if you are a human being.  It seems involved at first, and then you realise it gets exponentially worse the longer you play.


Runescape ***: I guess that counts as a browser-based game since it's in a browser, but it's more like World of Warcraft, with massive playerbase and fancy graphics, and nothing like the others above which are more text-based and played mainly by adults.  Runescape is dull as ditchwater most of the time, but has the one single benefit that you can pick it up and drop it again without any loss to your character.  Going away for two weeks doesn't need you to pause anything, miss out on anything, lose anything etc.  And in most cases you can drop it and log-out at a moment's notice with no bad consequences.  It's also dull enough and repetitive enough that you can play it with only 10% of your brain turned on which is handy if you only needed 50% of your brain on that particular phonecall and wanted something else easy to stop you falling asleep.

It's one of the few I've found where you can very much fit it around your life, rather than having to fit your life around it, yet on the occasions you do have six hours in a row to fill, it can keep you completely occupied for the duration.


All the above are free and friendly and run on donations and love, with the exception of Runescape which is free to get about 15% of the game, but costs about USD$5 a month for the full game and is run by a faceless profit-making organisation.

[squishymaster]

I put War of Empires up here too.  Do you still play?

[psymann]

I played v1 to v8, joining soon after it first started, was fairly successful there and a forum mod, but then left (and came to Battlemaster about that time).
Came back for one age in v12 with some other friends, but then didn't play again after.

Then came back last age (v24) as a request from Rage, mid-round, and am now playing v25 at the request of The Dagger, as part of SAF, trying my utmost, mainly with some fairly handy level 21 spies, to stop SALT from getting the empire victory.  Feel free to message me in-game if you like and are still playing also, where this age I'm "psyahbandah" in keeping with the Singaporean theme (syahbandar being a word for a harbour master).  And in the forum, I'm still psymann, same as here.  :D

[squishymaster]

Well if anyone is interested in checking out either War of Empires or The Reincarnation(New Archmage), I'd play a round with you.

[De-Legro]

Well if anyone is interested in checking out either War of Empires or The Reincarnation(New Archmage), I'd play a round with you.

What sort of time requirements do they have? I'm not able to log in more then once a day at the moment.

[squishymaster]

Well if anyone is interested in checking out either War of Empires or The Reincarnation(New Archmage), I'd play a round with you.

What sort of time requirements do they have? I'm not able to log in more then once a day at the moment.

You could do either of them at once a day.  War of Empires makes you produce resources automatically every 20 minutes? so if you wait too long you'll get attacked for them, but you can only attack people based on how many attack turns you've built up so once a day is fine if you don't jack up your income and just get your income from when you do your attacks.  Archmage only has you producing resouces when you spend turns and you attack from that same pool of turns, you can build up to about 300 turns in your pool before you start losing them and depending on the game speed you can get turns anywhere from 1 every 5 minutes to 1 every 15 I believe.

[Kai]

War of Empires seems like any other ladder-style game.

[psymann]

War of Empires is much like other ladder games, but in my experience of trying a lot of them, it's the best one.  The lack of having to wait for anything to happen (you click to attack, and the attack happens instantly, you click to build, and you build instantly) makes it much more pleasing to play and easier to slot around what else you're doing.  There are a few different ways you can choose to play, the players are a good bunch and new players have a chance to do well.

That said, I really do disagree that you can play by logging in once a day.  Whereas ticks happen every 12hrs in Battlemaster, they are every 10mins in WoE.

- To play individually, and not be very involved in the game, you'd probably need to log in twice a day.
- To play in an empire, which you'd likely want to do, you'd probably need to log in three or four times a day to make sure your account wasn't harmed (ie first thing in the morning, last thing at night, and a couple of times during the day - every day)
- To rank high, you'd need to log in every few hours every day.
- The best and highest-ranking players log in every hour and even pop in to log in in the middle of the night.  There's certainly no need to do that, and you can get full enjoyment from the game, and be part of the winning empire, without doing so.

I'd say to get a reasonable game out of it, you should be able to log in for 30mins in the morning, 30mins before bed, 10mins at lunchtime, 10mins at tea time and preferebly a couple of extra hours here and there during the week.  Most of the top players will be players who can leave it open on their computer while doing other things (eg work!) and just prod it for a few seconds every hour.  It is certainly not as lightweight as Battlemaster which is one of the great things about Battlemaster.  Nor is it as heavyweight as something like Tribal Wars.


If you do want to check it out, Age 25 is drawing to a close over the next week, then there'll be a week or so of downtime before the next age starts, and the Age 26 will begin with everyone starting from scratch again for a level playing field.  Feel free to contact me at 'psymann' on the forum if you want to know more.

[squishymaster]

Most games on the internet are ladderbased ranking systems, people want to know how good there doing in the grand scheme of things.  Not to mention in most games it also gives you a range of people you are allowed to attack and ones you aren't.

Logging in more often for pretty much any ladderbased game means a better position in the game.  However, that being said you can adjust things to make logging in less often not a complete loss.  For War of Empires there is a race, troll?, that gets lots of negatives for its turn production of resources but a large bonus to attack.  So you can easily keep your resource production low so people don't attack you every hour for the mass of resources you've built up and you can attack at night with your attack turns and since you're online you can immediatly spend it all.  You won't do as well as the guy literally losing sleep to check his game, but you can still check out the game, get a good feel for it, and do alright without feeling like your getting pounded for inactivity.  Or at least that was the strategy I used when I checked out the game and I placed alright.