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Tell that to the General :)

I apologize, you are right on that. Did you guys order the move later in the day ? Seemed like it IIRC from the scout reports.

Yeah, it was a late order I believe - should have waited the extra tick.

In other news, Suville once again shows poor military skill activity level, as they move first two-thirds of their army one day and then a half of what was remaining their to battle so they get their butts kicked.

Fixed that for you.

[NOBODY]

Then again, evidence shmevidence.... you should expect the Spanish Inquisition after all.

NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!

It was King Bartho (of Carelia) who commented about starting the war in an OOC fashion. This might have been the original war with Suville and Caergoth. It was long enough ago that Carelia has gone through 3 monarchs and as many duchies since then.

And of course, it will be more a OCC cooperation, because there is no way you can explain IC (without opposition), that you wish to conquer a continent just to have it go rogue.

Isn't this how the current war started? Some OOC co-operation between Carelia and the North?

Suville can hardly beat Carelia on most days. That and their distance make their stance in this war next to irrelevant.

It's not so much Suville's ability to project power past Tara and towards the NA, but rather the proxy war that Tara is waging via Carelia and Caergoth against Suville. As soon as it becomes are real war between the realms it opens up a whole new front for Tara to defend.

Of course, Ottar and his masters in Cagil won't let it come to that, but negotiations are pretty delicate at current. Carelia and it's "never surrender" policy aren't making it any easier.

C'mon, let's just have Darka switch sides then Tara can go beat up Suville.

Similar to Scott, this is part of my job. I work in the enterprise world where downtime means lost sales and forgone revenue. I would expect in a free game that there is not as much pressure on pure QA test coverage as there is with a business application but when game shattering bugs appear (see Friday's travel breaking bug) it does take a lot away from the ability to enjoy the game and recommend it to others.

That said I think there are two things that can be done to firm up the code quality.

1) Scheduled Release Windows - Whether it is an recurring window at a certain time each week, month or just some date that Tom puts forth, features get batched and released together. This can give the players a bit of a heads up when things are changing and provide some guidance for the dev team. This doesn't prevent emergency fixes of course, but they should be the exception, not the norm.

2) Automated Regression or Functional testing - Gold Panda's idea is spot on. Collect a list of the critical areas of the application and use a tool to automate execute or write a manual script to make sure they work. This will be your criteria to actually release the code to the players. Example areas could include: All PHP pages, Turn Change Script, Battle System, NPC faction actions. Is it as fun as developing new features? No. Does it keep your user group much happier? Yes. The earlier you catch an issue the cheaper (in this case, sweat equity and street cred) it is to fix.

Maybe it is just me, but I find it irritable that I click the forum link from the BM game page and I land on the forum without a link back to the game page.

Can we change it so the BM logo in the top left redirects to www.battlemaster.org instead of forum.battlemaster.org?

Or you can just call me lazy, no worries.

You can thank Tara for making sure that Suville stays out of this war.

They've done nothing but provoke Suville and support Carelian interests since peace was declare with CE. Very odd stance to take. Maybe their tune will change if their rurals get pulverized again.

80% Duke!

In the sleepiest realm on the map :(

Ah, so we could RP her as an impostor?

This was tried and failed. Enough people went along with it. I believe the official story was that she was kidnapped by pirates and the sea breeze did wonders for her complexion. Additionally many characters came forward to vouch for her person, identifying her by the hole in her head.

Perhaps a limit on the number of "friends" or "enemies" that a family can have, based on the only other metric that families have - fame.

You can spend up to X number of fame-based points declaring friends or enemies. These points are not refundable (unless the target family is removed from the game), so they would need to be chosen carefully. Over time, of course, you accumulate more fame, but you also accumulate more friends and/or enemies. Seems to me to get away from any gaming of the system as resources are relatively finite and slow growing.

Otherwise, my guess is that everyone would default to being friends with everyone else for whatever assigned effects that entails.

Thoughts?

Younger?  She is almost 50

And this is your second account with her, no? She was already into her 40's if not older when you deleted and recreated.