Topics

Banned by rogue judge; ruler lifted the ban (this is correct everywhere)

Trying to protest rogue judge,

"In your current relation with the realm at large, nobody is going to give a damn whether you disagree with the current government."

[Choosing your class]

This case has been waiting 17 days without response from the Titans & now the Colonies Island Senate needs some feedback on it to continue playing, so perhaps the player base can help clarify (I have formally withdrawn it as a Titans Case):

In Summary:

The Colonies have some sort of island-wide agreements in place, one of which is that you cannot be an infiltrator except in the Assassins Realm. I have challenged this on the basis that it violates your right to choose what class you want to play:

http://wiki.battlemaster.org/wiki/Inalienable_rights

The inalienable rights are:

    Playing at your own speed, timing and activity level, i.e. logging in as often or seldom as you like, at whatever times you like.
    Choosing which type of unit to command
    Going to tournaments
    Pausing your character(s) because you have a real life to attend to
    Choosing your class

The inalienable rights are defended with extreme prejudice. There's one simple reason for that: The second they were opened up to discussion, interpretation, exceptions, borderline cases, etc. the lawyer-weasels and others who get a thrill out of gaming the system would invade like locusts.

Absolutely no violations of inalienable rights will be tolerated, no matter how minor or inconsequential. Absolutely no interpretations will turn a violation into a non-violation. Absolutely no "I didn't mean it" apologies will prevent the punishment - if you are the guilty party, consider it a lesson for next time and a reassurance that you yourself will be equally aggressively defended should someone else attack your inalienable rights.

To me this seems pretty straightforward - the rulers can make an agreement if they like (this is Roleplay) but cannot actually enforce or punish - directly or indirectly - players for being infiltrators or carrying out normal infiltrators against realms they are at war with.

By "direct action" - You cannot be an infiltrator, so you are banned

By "indirect infiltrator" - We think it is ignoble to stab an enemy noble while not on the battlefield, so you are banned.

Thoughts?
 

http://deremilitari.org/2013/01/strategies-of-war-in-westeros/

regardless of how the topic of Aging goes, thought this was a good idea for a scroll.

Most of them don't seem that powerful, so maybe only removing 2-4 years is appropriate.

(A scroll that removes X years of age from user,  in case it's not clear what I'm talking about)

as the title say; think we all know what that means. Here's a couple brainstorms:

1) When I founded a religion, people would join but not follow "holy edicts" so I'd excommunicate them. But nothing actually happens.

There should be a large drop in honor/prestige & maybe affects on your region if you are thrown out of the church.

2) Churches have their own hierarchy in real life. Why not match that with parishes, etc. that collect gold from the temples/peasants, so that you can increase your influence by getting more believers. Also perhaps some prestige bonuses in there as well, would be natural.

A few fame points might even be possible, I'd think - x thousand peasants under your benevolent wing

3) A little far-out from how we actually play, but: make Gods "real". Like the Ancient Greeks, make the Gods actually influence things in the game. Maybe Gods overall believers can be translated into some sort of strength score & they can influence the outcome of battles, or you can sacrifice to them to increase your performance; maybe they will help guide an assassin's hand...

I know we don't want to go too far down that road with mechanics, but maybe there are some ideas that can come of that.
 
4) get rid of the rule where a religion dies when its last temple is destroyed. It should die naturally when no more temples & no more priests who might restart it with a new conversion of a lord, or building a new temple

Not attempting to troll - I've worded things as neutrally as I could think to do them.

Basically, should the game play out & is it still interesting for people at this point, or is it time to just reset?

- No battles for a couple of turns now
The local people enjoy the low tax rate.
With food distribution at double its normal level, the population is very pleased.
The Lord Archon's presence raises morale and loyalty.
Morale:   Joyful (100%)
Realm Loyalty:   Worshipful (94%)
Realm Control:   Main

Only complaint is that I'm not in the same religion as the majority. Every single turn, the population drops.

several (4-5) turns now - we have a couple of tiny monster groups. they can't be hunted, they never even get close to the walls before scattering, but every time I try to repair the walls I get the message above.

that affect needs tweaked a bit, IMO.

[85]

Small thing, but these should be working from same code & can be disruptive to Lord;

On the blue "Important Information" sidebar I have:

You have 446 bushels of food stored.
This store will last you about 85 more days.

From the food report:
446,   63 days

Whether or not these are only estimates, they should be the same estimate. One is only 75% the length as the other

or something like that, can't recall the exact wording and have only two hours so can't view my Economy page.

Trying to expand RCs, I *sometimes* get that message. My first RC I could expand; my other two could not. I have tried in separate turns & separate turns from when built.

I have no idea if it is because of some actual game restriction or if that is just an error message that something internally is going wrong. (This is on Dwilight)

This is a pretty big project, actually, so maybe we can break it down in actionable items.

There are too many cases in actions (and sometimes orders) where you can do two things in a certain order, but not the reverse. Even where there is a reason why one can't happen after the other, there is no warning to tell you to do it in the right order.

Examples (this is where we can list out specific cases for dev team, so please add your own):
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today I built fortifications first, then was told I couldn't hold court because all the men were off building the walls. I know I can do it in reverse, and I don't understand why those two things are even related

off the top of my head can't recall, but I think hunting blocks things but no warning is given that once you click you're "stuck"

No idea why that is there in the first place, but if there is no reason, please remove it. Once inside, most thing tell you how much time you need individually - shouldn't need two hours in your pool only to look at it

There are some places in the game where it is a bit frustrating as a player because there are multiple reasons you can't do something, but they are only shown to you one at a time. I think it would be nice if we can collect a list of those and see if they can be gathered into an array and all of them displayed

First example:

seems like this could all go in a single thread & save space:

Anywhere you see text that says you should go do X, and doesn't have a link to that page, list it here. These are just quick link adds like we did for Pay your men <--> Change Designation, so please use a separate feature post if you have more to your idea than that. With so many using their phones now, and the general enjoyment, this is really helpful.

I'll start:

How is this possible?

Rumours spread and tales are sung about a huge battle in Brive:
Greater Xavax vs. Perdan
Estimated strengths: 14760 men vs. 830 men
The Perdans Golden Lions (Perdan), sponsored by Odoaker Cuvelier, King of Perdan, Royal of Perdan, were led into battle by Marshal William De Braose.
Odoaker Cuvelier, King of Perdan, Royal of Perdan is spotted wearing the Crown of Warding.
Terrel O'Sullivan, Steward of Beziers is spotted wielding the Zane's Mallet of Taith Aenil.
William De Braose, Imperator of Perdan, Margrave of Perdan, Marshal of the Perdans Golden Lions is spotted wielding the Legendary Shield of Righteousness.
Kellan Dodger, Margrave of Bisciye was captured by a militia unit of Greater Xavax.
Hausos Thulvandil, Knight of Perdan was captured by a militia unit of Greater Xavax.
Krista Jared, Dame of Aix was captured by a militia unit of Greater Xavax.
Dgk Aroo, Knight of Perdan was captured by a militia unit of Greater Xavax.
Caspian Flambard, Knight of Perdan was captured by a militia unit of Greater Xavax.

Brive is a Vix region;  these are obviously large Xavax milita of the South Island Hero-killing kind, to capture so many nobles.

I'll troll a little bit:

Are you one of the people who doesn't have time to help volunteer? ;-)

Be nice to have sea lanes on the other continents

I know there are a couple of small changes, just wondered if their ability to gain in swordsmanship was tweaked in compensation? My guys have been fighting constantly for a long time now, but I don't see the gain message much, and they are both still at Fame: Swordsmanship 6 (which I know is affected by other things, but ought to rise above this, surely?)

Men fighting, getting wounded and dying  - armor only at 60% (now 64%) wounded.

That's the lowest I've ever seen it that I can remember.

Finally have time to sit down and spell out this idea. This post is geared toward the dev team & experienced programmers; without wanting to sound rude or abrupt, if you don't fall in those categories it's prolly better to just look on.

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I won't give a long preamble. You are working with an ancient, brittle legacy code written in procedural style, and because of that it is very difficult if not impossible to quickly fix bugs & to make new changes without the fear of breaking things. You have a long list of things you'd like to get to, but all of your time is eaten up chasing down bugs and so things like the "war package", reworking tournaments, reworking the advy game, etc are pipe dreams that won't happen for years. That's not criticism, that's just fact. Legacy systems are no fun.

Volunteers are needed, but experienced programmers make a good hourly wage and have no interest in spending their nights and weekends sticking band-aids on top of band-aids on top of band-aids of an old creaky legacy system when they could be making extra money or doing their own side projects. If you don't attempt to modernize, you're never going to get more than the occasional help from young college kids who don't really have the experience the codebase requires.

You need to find a way to drag the codebase into the modern programming world without doing a major upgrade all at once that no one has the time or probably the interest in undertaking. I've been giving some thought to this and have a suggestion I think will at least help get you started down the road.

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First, you *must* understand that the root of all the problems in your codebase is that it is essentially procedural. You will not be able to make any improvements until you start to move away from that. Code needs to be refactored to functions and then objects. Functions are not only about not repeating code; objects are not only about hierarchy. They are to move your code to higher state that are testable & follow SOLID principles.

This is not some giant, 3 year project - you do it bit by bit, each time you need to go into the code to fix or tweak it. Even so, it is a big project at first, especially if you are not familiar with this type of programming. That's where I have an idea I think can help.

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You are already using composer, meaning that you have an autoloader in place, and an easy way to add more external classes & modules. Many people don't realize that composer can be used to load classes directly from any VCS (ie git, svn) without going through Packagist - you can just pull it in from your own github or bitbucket account, for example.

What this means is - developer can help you out by writing small bits of code completely separate from the main code base, in a BM-owned repo, and you can simply pull it in & use it. The dev does not need to have access to the main BM codebase - or even know that's what he's working on - to be productive. This is VERY IMPORTANT because it also means a dev can volunteer to do a small task without feeling like they are being led down a rabbit hole.

How's this possible? Because good code is "decoupled". Let me give you an example.

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Let's say you need to rework the dueling code, for tournaments or whatever. Your current code probably calls the database (or Doctrine, making it easier ) to get the details of the duel, calls the database to get each character, takes some values from them and pass them into a function that runs through all the code and returns a result.

What *should* happen is you call Doctrine and get the two chars that want to duel & the details and pass to a "new Duel()" class... and it magically returns the results. "Duel" class was created by Pedro the Programmer & pushed to BM's private bitbucket account. He doesn't know anything about your database or anything else in your codebase; maybe he doesn't even know this is for BM.

He defines the data he needs you to give him, asks for your business logic & what info you need returned. Duel() is a black box. All the *dev team* needs to do is rip out all the dueling logic (in this case, prolly just a big function - it's a simple example) and write something like:

// get the duel & char info

$results =  (new Duel)->fight($char1, $char2);

// use the results to update the chars status, send message, etc

In other words, you pull out a big chunk of procedural code, hand it off to someone to turn into a set of *tested*  OOP code, and integrate it back into the codebase.

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Why is this wonderful?

- you make small tasks that you can more easily get help on, and get finished quickly
- you slowly increase your code coverage
- if the existing class later needs tweaks for new idea, *any* programmer can look at it and change it quickly
- you build up a small collection of libraries that can actually be mixed & matched and turned into new games -  a new dueling or advy game could be snapped into Laravel & rolled out in a weekend.

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As I said earlier, this is not some giant project that takes a huge commitment. It is as simple as setting up a new repo (a button click, and give a name), isolating some code and handing it over to turned into an object. It is a slow & steady improvement. I know there are still a million questions about how you would handle X, Y, Z but those can be explained in later discussions.

I am happy to answer anything, and even walk you through a simple example to show you how it would all work.

I would normally leave this as "something in the game to figure out", but I can't help but feel something is not right here.

Eidulb Outskirts has daemons & normal rogues traveling to Eidulb; I scouted 2-3 times showing they were moving before moving to Eidulb Outskirts, but when I got there was engaged in battle.

Scouted EO again, still shows them all moving to Eidulb.