Topics

[Title]

Our characters in BM are supposed to be nobles. Nobles travel and do things, they get out and compete, and sometimes they fight. Fighting is dangerous though. So maybe sometimes they fight with less dangerous, more noble things.

   
• Title: Comprehensive overhaul of non-combat oriented noble activities (maybe with slots for commoners?)
• Summary: Overhaul tournaments to incorporate an optional championship system. Allow hosting of smaller "regional" tournaments that don't require a dedicated tournament ground. Add more optional activities like grand banquets, royal dances, hunts, races, etc, with skills to support them. Larger tournament grounds would have larger rewards but also have some of their rewards subsidized by both noble and non-noble entrants.
• Details: Ideally, if it makes logical sense, each activity should have some associated skills. Hunt? Horseback riding + archery. Tournaments could be expanded with multiple types: melee, archery, mounted melee, mounted archery, joust, races, etc.; each with their own set of skills. Could also include a group fight scenario that allowed commoners (adventurers) to directly participate. Dances could not only have a singular skill, but also individual skill ratings for each type of dance. We could also have a set of musician skills that could be iether noble or not, and would allow diversification of the commoner game.
• Benefits:A lot of these would be rewarded with fame, honour, and prestige. Regional tournaments are really just worth the knowledge that you won, but the logic would be that winning locally would still be a thing that is tracked, something that could be included in formal announcements at other tournaments or events. Hunts, banquets, and dances and the like would largely be RP events with some skill checks, but would be geared more towards inviting outsiders or to celebrate major events (marriages, anyone?).
• Possible Downsides or Exploits: Someone would have to code all this, but I'm already planning on writing similar code for two other games (I might get to this sometime this year). There'd also need to be a concrete set of events figured out and what would play into success in them. We could even go farther if we want we could even go so far as to track how often two people compete in a thing against/with each other and give them more interesting results. Skill checks might be considered a step towards a more D&D-esque or RP-oriented game, or even one that could be more power-gamed but I'm not really sure how you'd power-game being able to dance well. I'm certain someone will try it though.
• Also, think of all the new fame points! <3

[Title]

Title: Additional Vote Counting Systems

Summary: Add voting systems that count based off the fortifications of a lord's settlement, by the types and number of soldiers commanded, as well as by the population of estates lorded over, or some other thing.

Details: BattleMaster is an old game, so it should be an old game with options. As such I shall detail each proposal below:

   
• By spears - Each soldier counts for a vote.
• By swords - Like above, but better soldiers count more.
• By horses - Only cavalrymen count for voting.
• By chivalry - Only the chivalrous cavaliers may vote.
• By forts - Lords vote based on the defenses of their holding. Better forts? More votes.
• By heads - Lords vote based on the population of their region.
• By honor - Nobles vote with weight based on honor score.
• By prestige - Nobles vote with weight based on prestige score.
• By guilds - Lords vote based on the number of guilds hosted in their lands.
• By archers - Because they're the best.

Benefits: The increased options allow realms to add some more flavoring to their ways and, and this is the really important part, this way people can't say "But M&F has..." in regards to voting types. Also potentially results in more unpredictable votes.

Possible Downsides/Exploits: Would require an update to the manual page and for some systems voting results could be unpredictable.
Blame Vita for this.

So, I'll admit, I really liked Frostpunk, and wish it had more variety to play with, but I was thinking about it the other day and realized I have a relatively easy to deploy code base that wouldn't be too hard to turn into a game focused on surviving a frozen waste as part of a community.

There's a few things I'd need to do to make it work, like overhaul and simplify the economy, as well as make individual citizens actually modeled in-game, but it's within the realm of possibility to use the Might & Fealty code to create a Frostpunk-themed online survival game, where the focus is on survival, inside-settlement dynamics, and exploration. (And yes, this would include dynamic creation and crashing of settlements).

If you're interested, let me know. If there's more than a couple people interested, we can get to hashing things out.

Oh, if you have no idea what the heck Frostpunk is, it's on Steam. And probably other places.

So, we were having a discussion about which would be interest to tackle as a side project, for when we aren't working on bigger things, and thought we'd just ask you all what you thought would make a good first or second project to look at.

Since we've got so many options, we're going to let you pick your top 2.

(If you're not seeing a voting option, click here to be taken to the forum.)

[Title]

Title: Monikers / Nicknames / Callsigns

Summary: Have a proper means to add callsigns, nicknames, monikers, or whatever you want to call them to character names.

Details: This would add a method by which a player can customize the nickname or 'callsign' of their character, having it appear in single quotes between the character and family names.

Benefits: People can add some more flavor to their name, letting them express themselves more.

Possible Downsides/Exploits: People can add some flavor to their name, not necessarily what others call them. It'd also take some coding work, though looking at how names are generated, I don't think it'd be *too* bad. It may allow non-SMA things in SMA environs, not that that can't be fixed with an SMA complaint to the titans. It'd be fairly simple to lock this behind a character lifespan requirement or an honor/prestige requirement or something too.

So, I'll admit some curiousity at this. Did anyone here actually buy the book and play it? Is it something that every player needs a book if they wanted to play remotely with other people?

[Title]

Title: Display Family Heraldry on Messages
Summary: Display a small version of the family heraldry on messages, probably on the right side. As heraldry is stored as svg files, this would increase individual message load sizes by, at most, 29KB per message.
Details: In combination with the above, the file size increase would only be per message if every message was from a unique person, and not just the game telling you what happened. As this would increase bandwidth usage and add another thing to see, we may only wish to add this to the main browser format, rather than the mobile view. It may also be possible to have a user setting to disable them, which might not be a bad idea.
Benefits: It looks cool and makes it easier to recognize message senders at a glance, in contrast with the game's "every name is white" present format.
Downsides: Load times would increase a small amount as the browser would need to download each individual .svg file for each heraldry, and it may clutter the message display.

_{Edit: Wimpie yelled at scolded me for not using the format prescribed for feature requests.}

Hey everyone, just thought I'd mention, if you want to chat about this game with your fellow players, there's a channel setup on the Lemuria Community Discord server here: https://discord.gg/N7kDSt5

Hope to see you around!

A [ERROR: "tug/pull/feeling/push"?]. Or a [ERROR: "feeling/touch/sensation"?]. The faintest of them, graced [ERROR: "his/her/its/???"? ASSUME: "his"] [ERROR: "self/being/conciousness"?]. No, it grazed his [ERROR: "counciousness/self/mind/being"?]. As one [ERROR: "dies/inalive/unbeing/destroyed"?], another is [ERROR: "created/begun/started/born"?]. That is what was [ERROR: "determined/predestined/fated/always"?]. No, it was [ERROR: "discussed/agreed/determined/fated"?]. Irrelevance. No matter. No time. No space? Pause. [PARADOX: Pause in zero spacetime?] Or it would be in that whence he had [ERROR: "come/arrived/appeared/begun"]. To him, the question was [ERROR: "unsounding/mute/pointless/meaningless"?]. He had transcended spacetime as well as [ERROR: "place/dimension/level/existence"?] and [ERROR: "place/dimension/level/existence"?].

He waited. [PARADOX: Pause in zero spacetime?]

[ERROR: "existence/self/level/dimension/all"?] [ERROR: "determined/begun/started/placed"?].

He waited.

Then the [ERROR: "place/being/existence/all"? ASSUME: "universe"] breathed.

Like those [ERROR: "before/not yet/after"][PARADOX: "Referencing non-referential point"] there would be [ERROR: "not-self/others/enemies/allies/beings"? ASSUME: "others"].

If he was here, they would be too. If they were not yet, they would be soon.

He [ERROR: "looked/viewed/surveyed"?].

A star.

A world.

The balance was incomplete.

So this was to be his beginning.

He would have many names, and many legends, but some would he was known as [ERROR: "Name/Self/Reference/Solarus"? ASSUME: Solarus].




Enter the trans-/higher-dimensional being.

So, some of you may be aware, I primarily work on M&F, but I've no problem sharing my efforts when I think there's a use for it. For instance, right now I'm working on a system for Might & Fealty to unify 90% of the game's future descriptive areas into a single place. Which, I know, I know, BM has had descriptions on things for a while. However, this will include the storage and maintenance of legacy descriptions for things, which means you can research them down the line to see what previous descriptions for an area were, who changed them, and when.

Fundamentally, for BM, this would put descriptions for characters, families, regions, guilds, guild houses, religions, temples, unique items, unit groups, etc., all on a single database table, all handled the same way, and for those that make sense to be researchable, have them be researchable.

At a basic level, BM and M&F are similar enough that the vast majority of my work on this for M&F can easily enough translate to BM, so once it works in M&F, minor changes are all that is needed for BM. This means the dev time should be relatively minimal.

The question is, is this something that BM would have an interest in having?

If so, what should be describable? And which of those should be a thing you can look into?

This topic has been moved to Development.

https://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php?topic=8052.0

If you do, what did you think of it, and would you be interested in seeing it again?

Anyone who remembers, care to explain what SpellMaster actually was?

I was around for it's semi-revival but didn't get into it, and I'd like to put a page on the community site about it.

So, as some of you may know, I run the M&F Fan Site & Wiki, and I'm expanding my hosting plan to allow accomodating a M&F Test Server. That said, I want to actually use most of this hosting plan, so I'm expanding the plans a bit.

It'll include:

   
• A primary LemuriaCommunity site that will aggregate associated sites and offer some central services
• A survey tool that will be used at least for M&F, possibly BM as well (it's under review)
• The MightAndFealtyFans Main Site
• The M&F Wiki
• And any other neat thing.

Ideally, it'll also feature single sign on for the various sites, and a part of me would like to bring back the old metabets system that ran for BM way back in the day, and potentially even reopen the BM War Islands game (potentially even expand it, and turn it into a thing of it's own, if Tom will let me).

That said, the main site for BM that will run a blog of it's own for news and updates and dev commentary and interviews or whatever, does not yet have a name.

So, if you'd all submit whatever name you think is coolest, we can do a vote on them once I have a list.

Thank you!

This topic has been moved to Black Forest.

http://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php?topic=7417.0

I know it's super easy to just copy and paste things in, but with multiple themes, especially any that have white or lighter color backgrounds, please take a moment to strip any color tags out of your post. There are a couple options:

   
• If you don't mind a loss of other formatting, you can just select everything in your post and click "Remove Formatting" above (looks like an A with an arrow to another A). If you'd like a shortcut for this, Ctrl+A is a shortcut for selecting everything on at least Windows. If you have the cursor in the post editor box, it'll only select everything in the post's text editor.
• If you really want the formatting, switch views to the non-html editor and look for anything that has the below and remove them. This will force the messages to default back a user's given theme's default colors for posts.

Code Select Expand

[color=255,255,255] or something similar, as well as [/color]

Your fellow forum-goers will appreciate it, I'm sure! Thank you.

Thanks to some poking by Wimpie, I've added a few themes to the forum, that you can select in your own profile's "Look and Layout" option. The default is Chocolate Curvaceous, but there are a few others, like Ambassador2.0 as used on M&F's forum, or AlphaCentauri if you like a starry background and white post backgrounds (I'm using that now, fwiw.)

If you would like to make some suggestions, you can find a large list of SMF themes available here: http://custom.simplemachines.org/themes/

I'll take a look at any suggestions, and unless they break something, add them for your enjoyment.

Hello Everyone!

First and foremost, Black Forest went live on Steam a couple days ago. If you've been holding out, Steam makes it easier than ever to download new builds, and the game is as free as it's always been.

In other news, I'd like to welcome Victor C, and Gabanus family to the forum moderation team. These two individuals have stepped up to keep an eye on the Locals boards, among others, which means I've more time to focus on more administration type things and less moderation type things.

Which brings me to my last point: The "Background" board has been moved to the Community category, all SM3 boards have their own quite place under "Tom's Other Games" now, and the BM Expansions boards are now under the BM category, and, most interestingly, a few new themes have been added. You can suggest more here.

If you've ideas on how we could make things better, as always, feel free to let us know! Thanks!

So, I had an idea earlier that maybe we'd foster some friendly competition while also foster better gameplay by having players elect a player of the month. The idea is pretty simple: each month players get to vote for one player or another based on how they play their characters, be they fun to play with, crafter of elaborate roleplays, or just unique. Each month out of the year would be a different person, and then at the end of the year, there'd be a player of the year award. The only rule would be that you can't vote for yourself.

As for what you'd get, I'm thinking maybe a badge of some sort for your profile(s), maybe some sort of other small reward thing.

Thoughts?

Double Announcement: First of all, Black Forest (previously known as "Shwarzwald") has been Green Lit! To all those who helped make that possible, I'm certain you've Tom's thanks, so give yourself a pat on the back or something!

Secondly, I'm looking for anyone who might be interested in helping to moderate the forums. Mostly this consists of reading posting in your area, putting out fires before they become wars, and cleaning up spam. If interested, inquire over at this topic: http://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php/topic,7334.new.html