Messages

31

Helpline / Box / Line / Wedge / Skirmish

« on: August 17, 2011, 08:36:46 PM »

Hello all,

Wondering if someone can help me understand this, since I'm finding the answer I expected is not true.

First off, the wiki says this:

Formation

Formation is the type of line your men deploy into once they are face to face with the enemy.
Line: Deploy in a wide line, usually 2-3 ranks deep depending on their number. This is the default setting.
 Normal melee attack
 Normal ranged attack
 Normal melee defense
 Normal ranged defense

Box: Deploy in a tight, box-shaped formation with more ranks. Box formations suffer fewer casualties and less disorder from a cavalry charge, and will generally withstand more casualties before panic strikes. The tightness of the formation makes them more vulnerable to archer fire. Due to a narrower front, they are less effective in offense.
 Low melee attack
 Normal ranged attack
 High melee defense
 Low ranged defense

Wedge: Deploy in a V formation, with sharp end of the V pointed at the enemy. A wedge formation will allow the unit to break into enemy ranks easier, doing more damage than other formations do. However, the unit is also easier to break up and will likely suffer more casualties itself.
 High melee attack
 Normal ranged attack
 Low melee defense
 Low ranged defense

Skirmish: Deploy widely, in a loose formation with considerable distance between the men. This makes them less prone to casualties from archer fire and other ranged attacks. However, a skirmish formation is not well suited for close combat and a skirmish unit engaged in melee will take horrible casualties.
 Low melee attack
 Normal ranged attack
 Low melee defense
 High ranged defense

So I'm going to assume for the moment that that is correct.

But it doesn't mention cavalry at all here.  And much as I'd love to add that information in, I don't know it, hence me coming to the forum to ask.


The reason I'm completely confused at the moment is because I know only a limited amount about formations in real life, but one thing I am absolutely sure about is that if you have a bunch of infantry, and you get charged by horses, you form into a box.  By getting into a box shape, facing outwards on all four sides, the approaching cavalry meet a wall of swords/spears/etc, and suffer greatly.  Whereas if you are in a line, the cavalry cut through the line, separating you from one another, and then ride around triumphantly hacking you down in pieces.

Yet I've just had a battle.  A relatively simple one:

Attacker:
16 Infantry (CS: 219, box, front)

Defenders
23 Angry Peasants (CS: 75, line, front)
4 Cavalry (CS: 129, wedge, rear)

What I would expect to happen in this battle is that when the infantry meet the peasants, the infantry would do more damage than the peasants because they have three times the CS value, but they'd not do tons more damage, because (a) the infantry are in a box so half of them can't reach the frontlines to attack, and (b) the peasants are in a line so they can all attack at once.  So three times the CS, take away a bit, maybe the infantry might do between 1 and 2 times as much damage.

And then what I would expect is that the cavalry, being in a wedge, would make a strong charge, but the infantry, being in a box, would be well protected from this.  Therefore the infantry, having a higher CS, would win.

But no.

Round One
Angry Peasants make 5 hits.
Infantry make 89 hits.
23 Angry Peasants become 19 Angry Peasants
16 Infantry remain as 16 Infantry
How did the infantry do 17 times as much damage? 

Round Two
Angry Peasants make 6 hits.
Infantry make 80 hits (14 on the Cavalry; 66 on the Peasants)
Cavalry make 299 hits.
19 Angry Peasants become 16 Angry Peasants
4 Cavalry remain as 4 Cavalry
16 Infantry become 5 Infantry
How did the infantry do 13 times as much damage as the peasants?
How did the cavalry do 3 or 4 times as much damage as the infantry?

Round Three
Angry Peasants make 4 hits.
Infantry make 57 hits (10 on the Cavalry; 47 on the Peasants)
Cavalry make 77 hits.
16 Angry Peasants become 14 Angry Peasants
4 Cavalry remain as 4 Cavalry
5 Infantry become 2 Infantry
How did the infantry do 14 times as much damage as the peasants, especially as they now have only a third of the number of troops to attack with?

Round 4
Angry Peasants make 4 hits.
Infantry make 20 hits.
Cavalry make 106 hits.
Infantry are destroyed.
Defender Victory!



So - there are really two questions here.

1) Why do the peasants seem to do so little damage for their CS?  The Infantry had approx 3 times the CS, but were doing between 13 and 30 times as much damage.  And it's not as if they were weak in attack but phenomenal in defence, for they died in similar numbers compared to the amount of damage taken.

Why especially did they do so badly, when the peasants were in the line formation which should allow them to do more damage than the infantry in their box formation.


2) Conversely, why did the cavalry do so much damage for their CS?  The Infantry had 70% more CS than the cavalry, and outnumbered them as well.  Yet the infantry, in the first two rounds, only managed 169 hits in total.  And the cavalry in their first attack managed 299 - nearly double the number.

Why especially did they do so well, when the infantry were in what must surely be the best possible formation for dealing with pure cavalry?


And I suppose almost a third one - given that the CS values were similar, I'd expect the battle to be close, but it wasn't.  My assumption is either that the game is wrong/bugged, or that the infantry picked completely the wrong formation.  So would there have been any formation the infantry could have used that would not have ended in their complete and one-sided destruction?

I'm baffled how the attackers can have had 219 CS in predominantly the right formation, and the defenders can have had 204 CS, in a formation that may or may not be the best one (I find it hard to tell since cavalry just seem to pick Wedge for everything and I have no idea how Wedge really helps them against a box or against infantry) - yet instead of a close battle that I would expect, possibly a slight win for the infantry who had higher CS and were well protected against the main defending force, it is a complete massacre of the attackers and the defenders barely get a scratch.


I can't work out if this is due to:
- cavalry charge being massively overpowerful
- CS ratings being incorrect and/or misleading
- my understanding of how good a box formation is against cavalry being wrong
- some sort of bug

I'd post the battle report for you if I knew of a way to do so.

Anyone able to help me understand that?

32

This Forum / Re: First Impression Sticky

« on: August 17, 2011, 05:21:50 PM »

Probably the best forum I've met.

1) Doesn't have people with big signatures
2) Doesn't have people with animated avatars
3) Loads quickly
4) Search function works
5) Clearly laid out into sections - enough to be useful, not so many as to be daunting
6) Child boards make sense
7) Show New Replies To Your Posts is easy to see at the top
It's a nice colour
9) Decent selection of formatting options

No complaints at all, apart from the rare occasion that the battlemaster icon in the top left covers over what I'm reading and gets in my way.


Correction:
One annoyance - the sunglasses guy has a short-code of 8 and ).  Since an 8 with a ) after it is something I might want to type, either to do a quick list as above, or to put a number in brackets, like this (7), but with an 8, the damn sunglasses guy turns up when he's not wanted - as above.  Other forums have him as B and ) which is even worse for the same reason but with an even more common thing.  Can he be changed to be some other symbol combination?

33

General Talk / Re: How to: Never have to retype a letter again

« on: August 17, 2011, 04:47:11 PM »

Have to say that the vanilla Opera browser is supreme for this. Just hit back and you're good to go. Might not cover a browser crash, but the most common eventualities, sure.

Agreed...

I used to have this problem years ago with BM and other games, back when I used either IE or Firefox.

Now I use normal Opera and have never had this issue since - because you do indeed just click "Back" and then it's all there where you left it.  Unless the entire browser crashes, I imagine, but that hasn't happened to me for years.  I just stick with Opera and don't need any add-ons   And it can cope with multiple "back"s if required.

34

General Talk / Re: What Browser Do You Use?

« on: August 17, 2011, 04:41:27 PM »

Has anyone been on vacation or away temporarily and wanted to check just quickly check BM or to seriously play, but then get on the only available computer and find only IE is installed?

Yes.  And with a dodgy dial-up connection, two weeks ago.

Took me about an hour to travel to one location and send one message because I had to zoom each page in to about 400% before the side panel stopped covering up the links for the travel and the links to send messages.  It was a painful experience.

---

I've used Opera ever since playing Tribal Wars, because it was at the time, and may still be, the only browser which gave enough customisation on short-cut key codes to allow me to send my attacking forces off in five waves of attacks in less than the desired 150milliseconds.  "The Opera Method" as it was known was the fastest and therefore best method for attacking other players, and the top players (not that I was one of those, mind!) all seemed to use it.

Once I got Opera for that, I started using it for other things.  I love the interface - everything is intuitively where I expect it to be, and they always seem to be a step ahead of firefox and chrome in improving it (most recent nifty addition being the ability to combine tabs at the top into groups and then collapse/expand a particular group, so for example I can have battlemaster game, forum and bugtracker all on one group, and hide it down to just one tab when not playing BM, then expand back to three tabs when playing again - I've not been able to do that with Chrome and haven't tried with Firefox as I stopped using it ages ago as I really hated the interface).

35

Other Games / Re: Browser Based Gaming

« on: August 17, 2011, 04:32:11 PM »

Well, if you want to try another age of War of Empires, the next one is due to start on 20 August.
I'll be called 'psyboarg' in-game there in the SETT empire if anyone plays it and wants to say hello.

36

BM General Discussion / Re: Punishments

« on: August 17, 2011, 04:27:45 PM »

currently, during appointing some lord, I found that all eligible candidates have the same claim strength. when i appointed one of them, locals protested "as they were other nobles with the same claim." i mean LOL  is there any opportunity that appointment will not cause additional punishment?

Odd, the other day I saw a lord elected who had no claim on the region at all (and was a knight of a neighbouring duchy under the same realm).
There was also a knight of the region for which the lordship was open, who was therefore already a member of the region and the duchy, and also had a weak claim on the region.

Yet despite the claim of the local knight being ignored, and despite a slight reduction in estate coverage soon after as well, the stats appear to have either remained in mid 90s or risen from mid 90s to 100.  There was certainly no protesting and no penalty that I can see.

37

This Forum / Re: Turning off replies to your posts on specific topics?

« on: August 17, 2011, 04:18:14 PM »

Hmm, thanks for the info, Anaris, so I can use Notify if I want to keep check of certain topics.

And the New Replies To Your Posts must stay doing exactly that.

I guess that makes sense, but it's a shame because the New Replies To Your Posts tells me in a very nice useful way, and not being able to remove stuff from it stops it from being as useful.


As regards the Notify option - how does that notify me, though?  I don't want it notifying me with messages and/or e-mails every time someone replies.  I just want a nice link like the one at the top for New Replies :-/

38

Development / Re: Retention Revisited

« on: August 17, 2011, 02:00:57 PM »

Haven't time to read the whole thread, but in case it helps to gather more tales of why people join, stay or leave, here are three from my experience:


1) Joined-and-left almost instantly

First time I joined battlemaster was in about 2005.

If I remember rightly, I joined the region of Venas on EC.  The first turn I spent trying to work out what I was meant to do - since there were no welcome messages within the first hour I was there, and there was no obvious reason to do any of the rather limited number of available actions, I did nothing, and thought I'd come back later to see what would happen.

When I came back less than a day but two turns later, a horde of monsters had moved into Venas (I assume from an adjacent region).  There was a battle, and given I was the only troop leader in the region, my unit was almost completely destroyed.  Then the following turn I had been hit again by the monsters.

So after one day - and by the second time I'd logged in - I had lost my entire troop of men to some random monsters that had sprung up without warning.  And there had only been a couple of scout reports during that day for me to read as well, and still no personal messages of welcome.  So my opinion at the time was:

"This game sucks.  First of all, nothing interesting has happened apart from one battle with monsters.  Second of all, that battle completely destroyed me.  Why would I want to play a game where I can lose my entire troop with no warning and with nothing I could do to prevent it?"

I left the game pretty much straight away.

2) Joined and stayed

Second time I joined was in 2007.  I was looking for another game to play, and once again was attracted by the description of it on the homepage.  It was only when I was half-way through the registration process that I suddenly realised this was the same game I'd played two years previously and hated.  But I figured I might as well complete the registration given I'd nearly completed it by then.

This time I joined Falasan on Atamara.

And this time my first day was completely different.  For a start, I spawned in Elroth, which was a busy thoroughfare between Barad Gardor and Barad Falas, so there were plenty of people there, and I didn't feel as if I was in the middle of nowhere, lost and vulnerable, as I had before.

I was then welcomed by a couple of players almost instantly.  Falasan was at war with Eston, and it was a busy war with almost constant fighting, and a battle every day.  It was only a day or so before I had a passable oath with Lord Kido of Elroth, and was placed in Falasan's main army.

Even before being put in the army, I'd been personally messaged by one or two of the other knights and told that I might be able to make myself useful in Belegmon, so I had some purpose right from the start, and some reason to do something straight away.

The things that made the difference were:
- Personal messages of greeting
- Some sort of instruction about what I could do to be helpful so I had something to do

3) New character and bad experience 1 (one player hogging all positions)

I created a Bureaucrat in Suville.  I discovered that, unlike Falasan, I wasn't really involved in what was going on.  At the time, Caergoth and Suville were separating from Abington.  While in Abington for a few months at the start it was kind of ok, but after six months or so I then ended up in Suville, where one player was simultaneously both Ruler, Banker and Duchess of Suville, having already previously been both Banker and Duchess of Abington.  I think also had another character as a region lord in the same realm, so one player with four positions in a highly populated realm.  I felt very much that I was only there as a pawn to help this one player have fun running his own personal realm, so I walked the length of Atamara and joined Minas Ithil instead.  It was nicer there, though I did find it took a while having to start again building relationships in a new realm which was less good.

It was approximately 12 months before any of my three noble characters got any position of any kind (lord, marshal, whatever).  Meanwhile, other players (and the one in Suville, though the worst I saw, was by no means the only one) seemed to hold lots of positions in other places while me and others held none.  That really put me off.

4) New character and bad experience 2

Perdan, this time.  I created an angry, disobedient-but-just-polite-enough-to-get-away-with-it-most-of-the-time character.  Bit of a rebel, but a rebel that still knew how to keep within the social constraints of nobility.  Ish.

Problem this time was to do with the players themselves, and was twofold:

a) There seemed a core group of friends who held all the power in Perdan.  Their characters all seemed to magically pop up to defend the other characters, and while that might have been acceptable in-character, the same players out-of-character again all backed each other up on every point of discussion, and it all felt very cliquey.

b) They seemed to be awful at understanding IC/OOC differences.  I was trying to roleplay my character as a nasty piece of work, but he wasn't so stupidly disobedient to walk to up to nobles and insult them to their face, nor was he stupid enough to write rude letters to people.  I wanted to roleplay him as being unpleasant, so people knew what he was like, and wouldn't then be surprised at his later actions of mild disobediance and his harsh tone.  But I didn't want him just to be blatantly rude.  So I roleplayed him a few times in a monologue, talking to himself or to his captain privately, being rude about the various other nobles behind their backs.  Since most messages he'd got had been from the council, he was mostly rude about them.  But rude about them, not rude to them.

Then, lo and behold, no sooner had he said these things in private, but all the council knew about it, and were sending him letters telling him off for being rude.  The next RP I did described him as _thinking_ something unpleasant _in private_.  Yet still within minutes the council members knew what he'd thought, knew it was mean, and were telling him off.  Try as I might to explain to them that their OOC knowledge through my roleplay did not equal their characters' IC knowledge, I failed.  I was accused of using roleplays to be rude about another character without them being able to defend themselves, when all I was doing was roleplaying my character as the nasty piece of work he was.  If they'd left it a little longer, and had he actually had anything of any interest to do that he could have done in a disobedient way, they'd have had plenty of IC reason to be nasty back, but they weren't willing to wait and just took offence.

That, and the fact that they wrote letters and tagged them as "Roleplay", and generally mis-used the different message categories, identified to me that the main problem was that I was trying to play the game in a different way, that while it worked perfectly in Falasan, Abington, Suville, Minas Ithil (and still works now in my chars' current realms), for some reason the players in Perdan had their own way of playing the game and it was incompatible with mine.

So I had to leave Perdan to find somewhere better to play, and, just as having to leave Abington with my previous character, meant I had to start from square one again in terms of building up his personality in little RPs so that the other members of my realm knew what my character was like.  So - I was the one that had to leave and start again, whereas they just got to continue in their positions of high power and lost nothing from my departure.

5) Good experience with new character.

Eventually, I deleted the two characters above (keeping the one in Falasan), and created a new one on Dwilight.  In contrast to my previous experience, where it had taken 12 months to get any sort of position, and weeks if not months even to get onto a message group that had anything interesting going on to talk about, my Dwilight character was talked to as soon as he joined Morek.  He was made to feel welcome, was given a purpose in helping fight the monsters, and after a month or two, had a lordship position for a week before monsters took it off him, and was a Vice Marshal and then Marshal of the smaller army.

Good experiences here were much like those of Falasan - made to feel welcomed, and given a purpose.

6) Quit completely

Went away for holiday for two weeks... when I came back I had a lot of catching up to do, and had slightly lost interest as a result of being away.  I'd also lost the positions I'd previously held.

In the end, trying to enthuse myself, I created a carefully thought-out roleplay that was sent in bits to the whole realm... and yet barely anyone replied.  At that point I figured I was spending far more effort in creating RPs that I thought would be nice for others, and very little time getting interesting replies back.  Only a couple of players in Falasan (who were excellent) and a couple in Dwilight were providing much of interest, and eventually I just decided it was all a bit too much effort for too little gain, so just stopped logging in.

And then had no interest to come back because I'd not bothered to pause my account, so the whole thing was deleted.

7) Rejoined after all

So now, 2011, three years after last playing, I come back, and I find many of the same issues as before:

My characters had almost no welcome messages from anyone.
- In Carelia, I had one welcome from the banker, one miserable 10%-of-a-small-region oath offer without even a note with it from a lord just after my estate, and one decent welcome-plus-oath-offer from one player (thanks, Revan).
- In Oritolon, I had only two welcomes - from two lords who also offered me an oath.  Thanks to those players (though actually, one of them was Revan again - I hadn't realised until I joined the realm that he was in both Carelia and Oritolon as well).

My character has no position of responsibility, yet sees others with more than one.
- In Carelia, the King is also the General.  Two positions for one character means no position for someone else.
- I do notice that that Suville player is still there as Duchess of Suville, so there's not been any change of Dukeship for Suville for years, then - and yet still, to my annoyance, in all that time hasn't found time to write (or get someone else to write) a description of the city.  And some of the rulers of realms have been so for two or three years.  So it still seems hard (whether or not it is hard, it seems it) to break into the positions of power.

My character has limited purpose
- In Carelia, this isn't a problem - there's a war to fight and my character was even given a special mission to undertake (just a shame that the game wouldn't let him place his militia, so this mission was impossible to achieve, but hey)
- In Oritolon though, there's "too much peace", so all my character can do is civil work.  He can't even do police work as he hasn't got enough honour to do that.  There is so little to do that he's just wandering around looking a bit lost most of the time.

My RPs are sometimes ignored
- In Carelia, I've sent a message three times now to the elder members of Magna Serpaensism.  Three times I've been completely ignored by all three of them.
- In Carelia, I contrived for my character to send out five messages to the wrong people, so that each character got a message that was inappropriate for them and/or made no sense.  Only two of the receipients gave me any reply to them at all.
- But to be fair, my RPs to both Ruler and Judge were responded to with good and mulitiple replies, so it's not all bad of course.
- I can cope with the fact my lowly knights have almost nothing of interest to do button-wise if they have something of interest to do RP-wise.  It's just a shame that there's not always much to do RP-wise either.

Conclusion:

Times I have been made to feel happy and have wanted to stay:
- When joining a realm, I have been sent personal messages of welcome that give me a little background info to the realm's current position.
- I have had a feeling of purpose: I can see why me being there is better than me not being there (other than just the fact my estate is useful).
- People respond to my RPs and continue them; other people post RPs I can respond to and continue
- Having plenty of messages to read that are not all kept secretly in senior message groups
- I have been able to see a chance that I might actually progress to have a position of importance for a while
- When I can get into the mindset that it is fun to write my own RPs and just read them to myself for my own amusement

Times I have been made to feel sad and have wanted to quit:
- Some players hogging positions of power...
- ...and there being so much less to do if you don't have a position of power.
- Not much turnover of those positions even if they're not hogging more than one per character
- All the RP being in secret message groups I'm not in
- Whole realms seemingly playing by a whole different set of RP rules than everyone else
- When I get into the mindset that it is fun to interact with other people, yet can't do so


Anyway, those are just my experiences, as someone who's joined three times now, and continues to waver between staying and quitting from one day to the next.

39

This Forum / Turning off replies to your posts on specific topics?

« on: August 17, 2011, 04:01:44 AM »

Hi all,

At the top of the forum, there's a link for "Show new replies to your posts".

I quite like that, it's very useful for keeping tabs on the threads in which I've been participating so I can keep track of them when I don't have lots of time.

But... there are one or two threads that I posted on once or twice, but now have no further interest in.  But a couple of them are popular threads so are getting many messages.  Obviously I can't delete my original posts from the thread, but is there any way to get it to stop displaying in the "Show new replies to your posts"?  Otherwise the feature becomes distinctly less useful.

Or am I using it wrong - should I be using some other sort of notification method for keeping track of particular threads of interest?

40

Helpline / Re: The people here do not like being ruled by us.

« on: August 09, 2011, 05:08:15 PM »

Sorry? "The locals are deeply devoted to Imperskoe Viys'ko iz Fheuv'na, and are bursting with pride to call it their home" and "The people here do not like being ruled by us" are *not* contradictory? There is no contradiction at all between bursting with pride about one's government and not liking being ruled by it? No contradiction at all?

This almost sounds like one of those Lateral Thinking puzzles.  And if it were one of those, I would be asking:

1) "The people here do not like being ruled by us" - Who are "us"?  The realm?  The government?  Council Members?  The local lord?  The local knights?
2) "The people here do not like being ruled by us" - Who are "the people here"?  Those in Pehk?  Those in Pehk and surrounding areas?  Those in the Duchy of Iato?

It would, for example, not be contradictory to say "The people here in Pehk do not like being ruled by Lord Scufflebottom, even though they are bursting with pride to be part of a realm with a comically long name".  Or to say "The people here in the Duchy of Iato do not like being ruled by a realm with such a long name, because although the people of Pehk think it's amusing and fantastic, the majority of people in the rest of the duchy just think it's a silly name invented by a ruler who wanted to see how long and unpronouncable a realm name he could make without being protested out of office".

41

Other Games / Re: Dave's Galaxy

« on: August 07, 2011, 11:00:51 PM »

Yep, preferences tab at the top.

Where?  Must be not looking hard enough, but all I can see on the preferences at the top are the options to change the colour, and to toggle the timer on/off.  Can't see anything about an e-mail.

42

Other Games / Re: Dave's Galaxy

« on: August 07, 2011, 12:06:35 PM »

Is there a way to get it to stop sending you turn reports on e-mail?

43

BM General Discussion / Re: Making Stuff Happen - A Rant

« on: August 04, 2011, 12:13:41 AM »

they can do much in maintaining their troop morale, paying them at right time, using excess hours to train them, economize with their gold. when to give them some hours of rest, when to use it for training, or for scouting - all that micro-decisions fall on knight
...
by civil and police work, courtier work, telling tales etc. region support is never limited to knight's region, much of time there are regions who need more help than their own knights can provide.

If we're still talking about newbies here, then:

- Maintaining troop morale is rarely an issue - it stays at 100% pretty much all the time unless you do civil work, and then there are two options to get the morale back - paying for lots of entertainment (which you can't afford) or paying for normal entertainment which you do instead.
- Paying them at the right time doesn't really figure.  You have autopayment so they pay themselves.  There is rarely an occasion where you need to be clever about paying them such that you can stay longer in the field, and in general as long as you don't pay them every day, they cost you pretty much the same amount per day on average, I believe.
- When to give them hours of rest: pretty much never.  Doesn't really do anything after all.
- Economising their gold doesn't take much effort: just don't train at the academy and don't buy 100 troops.
- Police work you can't do unless you're a Courtier, which you can't be if you are a newbie
- Courtier work you can't do unless you're a Courtier, which you can't be if you are a newbie
- Telling Tales you can't do unless you're a Hero, which you can't be if you are a newbie
- Region Support is actually just civil work, which you've already mentioned, and you can't swan about to other regions to do some because you have to be where your marshal tells you to be.

That just leaves scouting, training and civil work.  It's simple enough routine:
1) Scout anywhere you have been told to scout and hasn't already been scouted by someone else
2) If you have spare gold and can handle the equipment damage, then train
3) If you can't afford to train or you've been specifically told to prioritise it, do civil work.
4) If you can't afford to train, the region doesn't need civil work, and you've scouted everywhere, rest your troops and save four hours. 
All of these being mindless tasks requiring no thought.

44

BM General Discussion / Re: Making Stuff Happen - A Rant

« on: August 04, 2011, 12:00:09 AM »

1) Things happen that cause battles to be fought, regions to be won and lost, rulers to be overthrown, generally politically motivated
2) Things that give you something interesting to read and react to other than automated turn-change messages, that give interesting roleplay opportunity and some memorable moments

both (1) and (2) has its value, but without (1) other things do not work for too long

I'll agree with that much - it becomes stale if there's no change in realms, both in terms or their size or their council members and region lords.

But I'd also say that (2) is just as important as (1), and just as interesting as (1) - often more so.

they have many things to learn about how to lead their troops, how to be good army troop leaders, how to support region the best, and where they are mostly useful.

I think in terms of 'making stuff happen', there are two sorts of 'things' and we're probably talking about both at once here.

A) Roleplay
B) Mechanics

When I join the game, as a newbie, I can say that there is precious little of either.  And I know that there's meant to be little in a lightweight game, but I mean there's little to do in comparison with other players playing the same game.  Council members, Dukes, Lords - they all have more to do of both these things.

Years ago I moaned for a good while about the fact that simple knights have so little to do in game mechanic terms.  You say they have lots to learn, but this really isn't true, as JPierreD points out.  Every thing you do is determined by your army marshal (your settings, where you travel, whether you loot, hunt or do civil work etc - and doing anything else is considered disobedient).  And one or two things are determined by your lord (estate settings).  There is pretty much Nothing you can do as a simple knight that requires you to turn your brain on.  When I first started, it took me about one day to understand all the options available to me - the wiki is good, I can read, and that's about all there is to it.  I had two knights and one bureaucrat, and it was then a full year before any one of them got any position of any kind other than being a simple knight.  I certainly didn't need a year to learn how to be a knight.

Something I campaigned for back then, and still would love to see now, is more options for simple knights.  Things like a unit setting for your troop that differs for each troop (a bit like their favourite type of entertainment) and affects how they fight - which would be something that a marshal could not just send you instructions for.  Or advanced things you could do with your own estate, or something.

One of the two arguments back then, against that sort of thing, was that "players in high positions don't have much more to click on than simple knights".  Which I still think is untrue, because there are more options, including more influencial options and more though-provoking options, for lords, dukes and particularly council members.  And therefore I'd still love more options for simple knights.  I suspect that's something for another thread though.

The other of the two arguments back then were that "you shouldn't be just wanting to click buttons - it's a roleplay game".  And to a large degree, they were right in that.  It is indeed an RP game, and ever since then I tried harder to do more RP and worry less about buttons.  And I think that's been good.  However, you can only do this if there is some roleplay going on to interact with, otherwise you're just writing a monologue or writing a book.  And that's where we come back to this thread where we need more people to roleplay.  And, for new players, we need some of that roleplay to involve them.

If people have the high positions, with all the buttons to press, they need to give something back to the simple knights by providing something they can roleplay to - because besides roleplay, there is nothing for a simple knight to do.  I still don't agree that this _needs_ to be something that is political and realm-changing - I would say that some of it actively _needs_ not to be political so it's more inclusive for newbies.  But I do agree that if there is never anything political and realm-changing then that's not good either.

i saw guy who is excellent rp-er, spent some months in the realm, but when he was granted lordship, he destroyed the most stable region in the realm doing terrible region work, while being fully convinced that he is game veteran already

Is that a bad thing?  If he was roleplaying his character to be useless, then he probably did the correct thing in-character.  And if he wasn't doing it on purpose, then surely completely destroying your realm's most stable region is a fine event to inspire some roleplay - it is very much 'making something happen', isn't it?

i could only recommend that you try something on duchy or even region level at beginning, to initiate at least minimal conversation and find some friends, sometimes it works much better than sending letters to all

The easiest ways to get interactions is to write personal letters to people, as they feel compelled to reply.  Sadly most people you have reason to write to are those up the chain - your lord, your duke, your marshal, for example - most of whom are involved in political message groups that take more of their attention.  Armies are often the best place as there are lots of knights with nothing better to do, though of course a newbie doesn't have an army for a few days at the start.  The worst armies are the ones full of region lords who just stay in their regions holding court and not talking to anyone, which ironically are usually the 'defensive' armies that newbies are often assigned to at first.

45

Other Games / Re: Dave's Galaxy

« on: August 03, 2011, 08:10:10 PM »

Just tried registering to see what the fuss was about, and all I see is a black screen.  None of the menus seem to work, and it just looks completely broken.  Is it down at the moment?


Edit(psy): Worked it out.  The game appears not to be compatible with Opera browser, which is a bit lousy since Opera is so good.  I don't mind Tom making his game incompatible with IE because IE is awful, but not compatible with my favourite Opera?  *sticks tongue out at Dave*


Name:   Spherical Whatsit
Owner:   psymann
Location:   (1689.6,1820.1


At first sight, this looks like a big map of people who got here long before me and started building frightening-sized empires not far away from me.  And that feels rather like Tribal Wars, which scares me.  And then it looks as if the longer you play, the more colonies you get, and the longer it takes to manage them all, making the game seem lightweight to start, and then take ages in, say, six months' time.  And that feels rather like Tribal Wars, which scares me.  Please say it isn't so ;-)