Topics

181

Development / Reworking Trade

« on: January 26, 2012, 10:20:12 AM »

We are currently doing a total overhaul of trade. Feedback from many players summed up as "the old system is way too complicated and bothersome". While we're at it, we will also replace warehouses with granaries. A granary is simply a building you can construct just like any other building (scouts guild, smiths, etc.) so this simplifies things because it's one interface and not two.


The design goals are:

• Trade should be comparatively easy to do
• Trade should have a local aspect, to simulate a world where logistics are rough and travel slow
• Traders should have a space, but more in the spirit of masters of a trading house than as travelling salesmen

From this comes the following current design:
Every region lord (or his steward) can create Market Offers. These are deals of the "selling/buying X bushels for Y gold" kind. However, to simplify things, they are now all-or-nothing deals. So if someone is selling 500 bushels, but you only need 400 - tough luck. Buy the 500 or look for a different deal.

Region lords, stewards and traders can all access the "new" Marketplace. Actually, this is the old market place, the one you can build in your region and many regions (cities, townslands, etc. - can't be build anywhere) already have one.

When you are at a market place (or in your own region), you can access market offers from the nearby regions. Traders have a further "reach". So if you are a region lord and in desperate need of food - travel around to market places and you can find something. Or make a trader do it.

When you accept an offer, the food is delivered.


And that's it.

Right now, the system is a bit rough, and all trades are instant. We will later replace that with caravans being sent out.

Here's a screenshot of what the new market place screen will look like. This is for a trader characters, non-traders will have a lower trading distance.

182

Magistrates Case Archive / Updated Rules

« on: January 21, 2012, 03:50:25 PM »

I've updated the "rules" for the courthouse slightly. Read them again

The most important change is that I've clarified that we don't want to discuss hypothetical, theoretical, "what if" scenarios during arbitration of a case. If player X has done Y then that is the topic to be discussed. "but would it be a violation if he had done Yb?" is not a question that belongs into the discussion of the case, simply because he hasn't.

Hypotheticals have their own place - Questions & Answers.


My hope is that this will streamline the case discussions and lead to faster results and less ill will because the waters get less muddy.

183

Development / Population Rebalance and Harvest Change

« on: January 19, 2012, 01:41:33 PM »

I am working on rebalancing the region system, something that I have planned for a long time.

The basic idea is that cities are way too important and way too big. The world we simulate didn't have this amount of urbanisation.

The result is fairly simple: Population of cities will be reduced, population of rural and other regions will be increased. Food and gold production will change as well, but not on a 1:1 basis. Rather the focus is to keep it stable at least on the large scale (whole-continent view). In fact, gold production will increase slightly (10-20%).

Now for food, there is a bigger change. Food will be produced daily in the future, not in weekly harvests.  This should dramatically simplify food management. Both food production and food consumption will be increased a bit (around 30%) so there are less rounding issues with daily cycles.

I am still working on the details. But I would like to send this live soon, because some improvements to region management depend on it. For example, with this new system we can give region lords a much better estimate of food production and consumption, again making managing the region easier for them.

Naturally, some regions will profit and some will be hurt by this change. There is not much I can do to avoid that, it's the nature of all change. That is why I tell you now. If your realm already runs heavy on cities and has too few rurals, or the other way around, this will affect you strongly. Though it's not simply "bad" - if you have many cities, you will suffer a decrease in gold income, but since you will have fewer citizen to feed, your food shortage may be less critical in the future.


Here are the numbers I am currently playing with. They are for informational purposes and may yet change before I send them live!

• Cities: 60% population, 80% food, 78% gold
• Townslands: same population, 125% food, 126% gold
• Rurals: 140% population, 180% food, 144% gold
• other regions: 120% population, 165% food, 144% gold

184

BattleMaster Expansions / Beyond the Blight - not selling well ?

« on: January 13, 2012, 08:40:15 AM »

The e-book "Beyond the Blight" isn't selling well. To be honest, sales are so far below my expectations, that I'm wondering if something is broken or what's going on.

Please help me find out what's going on by answering this short poll. It takes less than 30 seconds.

185

Development / New Editor

« on: January 11, 2012, 07:59:56 PM »

I'm replacing the WYSIWYG editor in BattleMaster with the more advanced CKEditor. It has been in a few remote places for a few weeks already and caused no problems, so I'm now rolling it out to most of the game (on testing, at least).

The new editor has a couple really nice features. But if you notice anything that got lost, let me know.

186

Development / Help me cache

« on: January 09, 2012, 10:07:55 AM »

For some reason, the images, javascript, etc. of the new dynamic map are not being cached. That is what makes it slow.

Someone who knows the ins and outs of headers, pragma directives, apache, etc. - can you take a look at it and tell me why? I thought I had set up everything correctly.

187

BM General Discussion / Anniversary / New Years Eve

« on: January 02, 2012, 12:48:41 PM »

While I wasn't exactly online during the actual anniversary, BattleMaster is now 11 years old.

What a ride it has been. Maybe some of you want to share a memory or two with me here. I know that a couple players have been around from the start or at least almost. For the others, follow me down memory lane:


SpellMaster had been my child for I'm not sure, maybe two years or so? When I had this crazy idea of not telling the background story, but actually creating it. Thus BattleMaster was born - a very simple tool to move armies around a map under player control to create the wars and breathe life into the realms that SpellMaster had in its background.
The original BM was incredibly simple. We didn't even have takeovers. Basically, you could create a character, recruit a unit and go fight.

It became popular. Soon, the East Island was too small and the first additional game world was opened, then the third, and so on. Frankly, I don't remember all the details and timelines, it's been too long. Some things are preserved on the Wiki, if you search for them. For example, the first April Fool's that is documented is from 2003, though I think I did one in 2002 as well.

For the 5th anniversary, I did a couple big things, TradeMaster was launched as half serious and half joking (especially the name). I also wanted to do a "world map", but that didn't happen.


Then there are the sad times, too. There were a couple fights with players and dev team members. People who I enjoyed playing with leaving, accusations that I'd be cheating with my characters, crap like that.

And there were good times. OT has always been a ton of fun, even though it's not going anywere. I've been ruler of a couple realms and always enjoyed shaking up the power balance. Oh, Lasanar - those were the times. The first realm that was essentially ruled by its dukes. Well, officially at least... *grin* And, of course, I will never forget when the tiny Ubent forced Perdan into surrender. Can you imagine that today?


And then there came a time when BM became too tiresome and complex for me and I needed other places to put my ideas. So War Islands was born, as the polar opposite - entirely transparent and simple. And The Dream, and now Beyond the Blight.

And then the return to heavy coding, with moving the entire code to Doctrine now, and re-working a number of things along the way. I want to have less complexity and more emergence in the game, less mechanics and more possibilities. It will be a long road.

Also, I don't want to forget that 2011 was the first time that I met BattleMaster players in real life, if you don't count a few of my friends who played the game at one time or the other.


It's been an interesting 11 years. Here's to the next 11 and to everyone who'll still be here for the 20th anniversary.

188

BattleMaster Expansions / Beyond the Blight

« on: December 30, 2011, 08:26:25 PM »

http://wiki.battlemaster.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Blight

189

Feature Requests / Feature Freeze

« on: December 28, 2011, 12:56:02 PM »

We are not taking feature requests right now, because we are in the middle of a major code overhaul.

You can still post them, but don't expect them to be added anytime soon. We really need to get the existing code updated first.

190

Development / Takeover Feedback, please!

« on: December 16, 2011, 12:11:31 AM »

There are a few TOs now running with the new code.

I would like to see numbers. If you don't mind sharing them. I'd like to know how many soldiers you needed to start it, and once a day what the % values have changed like.

TOs are incredibly hard to simulate on the dev server, so I need some feedback for final tuning. If you are willing to reveal more, like how many people worked on TO actions, etc. - everything helps. The more data I get, the better I can tune it.

191

Development / Large Update Bugs and Breaks

« on: December 12, 2011, 09:51:12 AM »

This topic reserved for tuesday. Please report bugs and breaks caused by the large update here instead of the bugtracker, so we can investigate and fix them more quickly. If you do, please keep an eye on this topic as we may still ask you to do a bugtracker report if the bug is complicated and can't be fixed ad-hoc.

192

Development / web statistics

« on: December 07, 2011, 06:17:02 PM »

I've set up awstats - a web statistics tool - again. I've used it before. When it's done analyzing last years logfiles, I will have interesting data regarding browsers used, etc.

I would also like to have country statistics, but the volume of log data is far too high to allow for that. I have more than 100 million lines of logfile that the tool goes through. currently at a speed of around 10,000 lines per second. Which means it'll take about 3 hours to do it all. Resolving location data would add several more hours to that. I may do it for the future, though.

I'll post the results here. It'll still take quite a while (it's at 17 mio. lines now).

193

Other Games / Skyrim

« on: November 10, 2011, 11:37:00 PM »

If anyone is looking for me... that's where you're going to find me. :-)

194

SM General Discussion / Map

« on: November 04, 2011, 05:30:56 PM »

http://maps.battlemaster.org/SpellMaster/openlayers.html

195

Development / Feature Cut: Takeovers

« on: November 03, 2011, 11:51:08 AM »

Now that has you alarmed there, hasn't it? 

No, I don't want to remove takeovers. However, I would like to merge the different kinds of takeovers into one, and make the process more fluid. So instead of starting a kind of takeover, you would initiate a takeover, and get additional options that make it friendly or brutal. So there would be only one kind of takeover, but you would not just sit there while it happens, you would have the option of actually doing stuff, and what you do determines what kind of takeover it is. Basically, each turn, everyone gets the option to be brutal or friendly, or a mix. With the corresponding changes in region morale, loyalty, etc.