f13.net

Linky (http://kingsage.org/)

Build a settlement and castle, train troops, make other people miserable. Everything you have come to expect in a browser game! I am in as WayAbvPar.



Edit- Unfucked the link. I am on World 1 @ (360|238) K23 whatever the hell that means.

You're logged in in the link.  It takes you to an error page.

Also.  What's the RMT catch, and is it worth it?

Which world shall we dominate?  :why_so_serious:

Is the game bwoken?  I can't get it to do anything or show any messages. 

Try THIS LINK. (http://www.kingsage.org/index.php?s=main)

From his broken like, it looks like WAP is on World 1?

Ok, started a thingy on Continent 36 on world 1.  Whee, building stuff.

You can't read the forum without registering, lose.

It looks like the typical resources -> buildings -> troops -> war game.

Is Continent 36 NW, NE, SE, or SW?

These guys have a ton of browser games:

http://www.gameforge.de/content/view/24/23/lang,en/

Oo a vampire/werewolf game .. http://www.bitefight.org/  (Say Viin is your friend on registration if you try it, gets you on the same server).

Looks like starting and re-starting position are randomized. So I'm in on the periphery of civilization, surrounded by strangers waiting for the slow tick of resources. I think I prefer the West and Estiah approaches were you're actually a participant in a larger organisation (town, guild) and can actively work to grow your character.

Looks like you can't actually take over other villages until you have a count (an awful lot of resources) so turtling, opportunistic raiding on empty towns and getting rolled by established players constitutes the end-game.

Hmm, I dunno, how do I find out?  I'm 667|396 but I think that's just within my continent.

shady_records_92?

From reading the forums it looks like it's only one (infinite?) landmass. New players or those who lose their land get started on the rim of expansion. The initial choice would then be which edge of the sphere you get placed on. I guess they don't want people being able to choose their starting positions or set up near their allies. Which is a shame really, because it would be more fun that way and better for defending against established players.

Hm, not infinite.. 0 to 998, so initial point was probably 500,500. If there are other continents it doesn't look like there's any way to see them or travel to them. It tells me I'm on 23 though (370,230).

In as Musashi.  The RMT looks retarded, and I don't think I'll pay for this one.  But my inner douche bag yearns to destroy people.

There's not a lot of "width" in the tech tree or strategic options. And the berserker troops are just designed for zerging with.

According to the in-game calculator 20 berserkers vs 20 templar (the strongest defensive infantry) hiding behind a level 5 wall will lead to 2 templar surviving the battle. That's hardly a comforting outcome. And other than having more numbers or more wall there's no other troop structure I can find that does much better.

You can sleep better knowing I'm going to make someone else pay for what you just wrote.

This is a good looking game.  So far I'm really into it, but my village is right beside someone with a lot of points 680, compared to me (50).  A bit worrying. :)

The points build up pretty fast.. I'm at 490.

I've been happily launching attacks against a nearby abandoned settlement. While it has no defences it still has resources to pillage. However the travel times are pretty substantial. I'm in one corner of a map grid box and it's on the other side centre so about 5 units of distance meaning a 2 hour and 40 minute round trip for my squires.

I'm frantically going for Barracks so I can raid an abandoned settlement as well.

About how many dudes do I need to attack a noob town?

Also.  Whoever made Bat Country, toss me an invite?

I checked and no one had started BC, so I did and invited everyone who's IGN is the same as their forum name here. If you didn't get an invite, post your name here or send me a PM in game or here.

Might as well invite me: Viin

Invite please, same name.

Invite me too;  Tannhauser.

I take it this game is fairly typical of Travian / Tribal wars and a whole bunch of other similar games?

Some other bits from the forums / help. You get a 5 day immunity from attacks on starting, you can't be attacked by someone with 20x more development points than yourself and a duke (required to take over settlements) cannot travel more than 70 "fields". Oh, and the top people in world one generally have about 26 settlements to their name.

Thanks for the invite, I'm in.  I am currently researching berserkers and have about 5 squire and 5 templars.  Stone seems to be my scarce resource.  I am the king of wood if anyone would like to trade.

From what I can see trading is advanced tech. You have to set up a level 5 warehouse, level 3 mule farm, then a market, before you can use up the mule to move some amount of resources... probably with massive travel times too.

Just tested with a squire (hopefully mules are faster) and you are more than 7 days travel time from me. Wow, I thought travel times in "The West" were extreme. At least that did allow me to confirm that the different "continents" are really just zones of the single map.

Feel free to practice your PvP on whoever this is tia.

You are the most advanced amongst us and your attackers castle is 4 times more advanced. I cannot see any other outcome than you getting rolled. It could be a spy mission though, I think those show up as attacks.

Maybe time to dodge? build a hide to protect your resources and send your army somewhere safe (eg. an abandoned town or ally). They probably don't have the stream of counts needed to take your settlement.

Send invite; "Ghambit."

I don't know how to find that guy to attack him.  Also don't know how long the newbie-shield stays up but I now have a tiny force and my raids on the abandoned settlement are bringing me a little extra resources. 

If you press the ranking button on the top left you can search by player, and thus find their towns.

On the help display there's a "Other information" panel which says the newbie protection is 5 days.

Also be aware that attacking at night comes at a 50% penalty. And night is always from gmt+1 to gmt+9 (I think) so you'd want to map that to your own time before you consider attacking.

A lot of this is not at all obvious from the game intro or info.

Anyone else having trouble loggin in?  I cant get in unless I use my activation link.

No problems here.

Invitations sent.

I am loading up on Templars for defense. As soon as I have the resources I will upgrade the hideout as well. It was a spy mission- what does that do? I haven't had time to read up much on the mechanics yet  :oh_i_see:

I got lucky and got put right next to an abandoned settlement.  Im cranking out squires to pillage.
Must we have a residence and a count in order to take over a settlement (abandoned or not)?
Do you see the requirements for such things??  They're insane. 
What's the point in warring if the material need to take over something is so high?

I think you can raid it for resources with any troops, but I am not sure about taking over.

u need a residence and a count, and the mats needed are ridiculous

Gave everyone who has joined thus far invite rights, so let's get some more warm bodies in here.

Scouting mission tells them what you have in your town. So I assume buildings, troops and resources. You can defend against them by building twice as many spies.

They've designed the rules to make it harder to spread your empire quickly. Both capturing villages and moving resources takes infrastructure and you can't merge or gift armies. Though once you are established sending a "nuke" including overwhelming forces and a count followed by 4 waves of counts at 1 second intervals gives you a pretty much instant capture of a city. The balance against this being that you can't attack someone 1/20th of your size.

Also off the forums the count that actually captures the city is consumed and the count dies if you lose more than 50% of the army in the attack. Each count who reaches the town captures it by 20-35% and the capture rate reduces at 1% an hour. They can also use the siege weaponry to destroy your city wall as part of the attack.

There do seem to be a surprisingly large number of not abandoned but not developed towns though. Not sure why. Lots of people signing up and then thinking better of it?

Lastly I wonder if we should look at our distribution and consider re-rolling while it's still early. At the moment with some of us having 7 days travel between us there's very little we can do to support each other. Though I guess you get to restart anyway if you do get rolled.

Re-rolling would be wise so we could all pick the same zone direction.  
Grebo should've given more info. than just "whee."  Like, which direction he chose to build in.   :oh_i_see:

Then again, I've only got 350pts., so I have little to lose except this juicy abandoned settlement next to me.

The map (or maybe just the non premium one) sort of sucks for getting a strategic view.

Below is our distribution with the number of towns in blocks of 20 "fields". Note that even though WayAbvPar and I are neighbours it's still 3:50 to move a squire from one to the other. The rest of you are all many days of travel away. And given a duke can only travel a maximum of 70 fields there's real limits of moving far from your start position.

Of course the other alternative is we just go for it and the people who get rolled by hostile neighbours use that opportunity to re-start closer.


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Y'know.  The main reason I play this game is because there's a building queue.  If it didnt have that I'd put it down.

It would be even nicer if you could queue stuff to build when resources are available.

I'm willing to reroll.  There are a couple of superpowers close to me and that makes me  :ye_gods:

I'm already at 1200 points, but I could reroll... I have no idea how to find you guys on the map or tell where I am, so umm yeah.

We dont all have to reroll, only the folks who are in the boonies alone and/or w/o a lot of points.  If you go by the diagram, it looks like most folks are in the NW corner.  So I guess if you're in the NW corner you're fine... otherwise reroll.  (a shame, I have a really nice spot in the NE)

Really though, with travel times the way they are.  It almost makes no difference if we're all in the same zone or not... especially since it's still a random draw even though you pick the zone.  Could be right next to someone and it's still 3 hrs.   :uhrr:

I logged in a bit ago and saw an attack incoming on WayAbvPar (the little banners under the windows on the towers at the side of the display roll down to indicate an incoming attack). It had 40 minutes till arrival and was launched from a 4k point castle. Just vanished though, so maybe was aborted en-route?

No it came through. 100 crusaders and 50 black knights vs my 13 Templars and 14 Berserkers. I killed one crusader.

Hmm I guess the attacks don't stay in the Alliance pages, bummer you can't keep that history at the Alliance level.

Has anyone found a better description of what the buildings do?  The building help is pretty pointless, as it just regurgitates the blurb in the game.  The blurb of course, is pretty useless.

There's some FAQ's on buildings and units on the forums. They're pretty straightforward. The alchemists lab seems really useless though allowing you to spend resources to buy one use of some premium features.

The attack is interesting in terms of what constitutes a mid-level attack force. No real way any of us could survive that, though both templars and berserkers are very weak defenders against cavalry. My forces would have been able to kill a couple more of them but it still would have resulted in 100% of my army dieing. Need more archers.

Ok i think im the 1 SW of kageru and WayAb. Someone sent a tentative attack against me (40 squires) whom i slaughtered without a loss. Should i reroll or am i close enough? The maps sucks massive ass.

I'm not rerollin at this point; i've got it too cushy here.  Maybe down the road if things dont work out.
I've got donkeys/market up so maybe when things get movin we can work up some trade.

Yeah, I reckon only re-roll if / when you get steam rolled. You can't select your starting position with any precision anyway and the travel times are nuts.

I was thinking that may explain all the 50 point settlements around though. People make an account, start a castle and if it's not near their allies just make a new account.

The building phase is pretty slow going. Pumping resources into some troops and upgrading resources but it's going to take a while to get anywhere, and there's not much you can do while you wait for more resources.

Are moving troops visible on the map? And who is Sirpetergriffin? Hes the only ally remotely close to me.

I've found the templar zerg very useful to just queue attacks on adjacent noob settlements, pillaging whatever you can as often as you check up on your settlement.  It helps with resource gathering immensely.  The noob towns closest to me ran out of stuff to steal a couple days ago, though, so now I'm finding I have to go farther afield.

Of course this also helps slow down any would-be noob adversaries, but I'm not even sure most of them are even still playing.

I just use squires. They move faster and carry more. Plus apparently some people "spike" the abandoned towns by re-inforcing them with troops leading to farmers getting a nasty surprise. Thankfully resources do regenerate as I've been happily pillaging a local abandoned town.

I've just been pillaging with squires at 100/stop at an abandoned town right next to me.  I should probably start attacking the newbs though to thin the herd around here; starting to get crowded.
Otherwise, I'm thinking about going the Helm's Deep strat and hiding behind my high walls.

How effective are the walls?

4 of my templars killed 44 squires with 2 losses. I believe my wall was at level 2-3.

 :ye_gods:

Walls it is.

Squires are weak weak weak vs Templar.

Yeah, 1 templar = 6 squires even before you consider walls. Building town walls doesn't seem terribly resource intensive either, though the build times are massive. My next level is 9.5 hours to build.

Does not building up your castle reduce build times?

yes, level 8 wall took 1.5hrs with a castle level of 8.

My castle is still level 1 since I'm limited more by resources than build times.

Ahhh i was under the impression castle level also decreased cost of other buildings. And it appears that i was mistaken.  :heartbreak:. Resource gathering is so slow in this game i just ramped up my warehouse/walls/resource nodes. So i could ignore the game for a few days while my stores max out.

It's only slow if you dont upgrade your nodes.  Actually, I find it fast enough and largely dependant on the size of your warehouse.  You're pretty much forced into upgrading your warehouse if you ever hope to open up any new settlements.

I believe no modes are all level 8-9 and my warehouse an store about 3 days of production. Which i could spend in a few hours of building. How exactly does the mule/market work? And alchemist for that matter.

Mules are used to trade resources with other settlements, utilizing the market.
Alchemist is just used for research (mostly for barracks), but I believe is also needed in order to make a residence and mint.  Which is what you need to make more settlements.

Ya, after I got the market built its pretty self explanatory.  WTF is up with the forum, i cant view threads until im a paying customer? The "register" link takes me to the front page in which I am already logged in.

Yea, I couldn't figure the forums out either.  So I gave up.

I just found out the hard way that you can attack yourself if you pre-spike a settlement.  There goes 10 squires.

Even though my production has climbed steadily the cost to upgrade resources has pretty much kept pace. It's still over 5 hours of waiting for the limiting resource to be generated for an upgrade. It's hard to tell how much to divert towards troops though, while I can't realistically beat a more advanced attacker I can at least become more "spiky".

This style of game would be much better with a "rout" mechanic where if you are crushed in combat you lose a percentage of your troops but the rest are considered to have fled the field and will slowly return. It would work even better if the percentage reflects the incoming force. If the attacker has absolutely overwhelming force I'd prefer my troops to break and give me some foundation for a recovery rather than the current fight to the last man model.

Does the progress bar indicate the "max" amount of points a settlement can have? As in the building levels have a hard cap and when all capped its 100%. Or does it indicate how many available points you have used? As in there are no hard caps on building level but the settlement itself has a point limit.

There are hard caps on the building levels, and you need to cap them all if you want to build the monument.

I assume the progress bar is connected with what percentage of build points you have towards a fully completed town, but the exact scoring is a mystery to me. The only relevance seems to be that if someone has more than 20x your points (easy when some people have 26 towns) then they can't attack you. Though 20 towns to 1 still doesn't exactly seem like a fair fight.

Yeah, much of this game is still a mystery to me.  Not much to report though, raiding defenseless towns and building up mine.

I've actually found a game that's a lot like King's Age (called Damoria), but you get to choose your starting location and land spaces all have varying degrees of resources that you perhaps fight/trade over.  Doesnt have the same degree of graphics though.  (maybe I'll post up a thread about it, too much text for my tastes though)

I have an incoming attack from someone with double my points! I get the notification 5 minutes passed the abort window for my 70 squires of course.  :oh_i_see: Can you use market contracts as a safe hiding place for materials? And then just cancel the offer when you require the goods? Or is there a penalty for canceling an offer?

I saw that. An attack from a large guild called the "Pirate King's" is always a bit worrying.

Don't know about market contracts but you can queue up building to protect resources... and having your squires travelling might be good, since if it's a real attack force you are probably not going to win.

The main thing I don't like about these games is the development is so linear that fights are rarely going to be fair, and to survive as the weaker you have to be constantly monitoring your base for attacks. Having to respond at the attackers convenience isn't much fun. Sure there's a night defensive bonus which is helpful if you're in one timezone of the world.

I have 20 archers and 20 templars with level 9 walls. If i had my 70 squires i figured i could stave off a force measured in 100's. But if its 1000's im pretty fucked. Has anyone figured out the forums yet? The help files are horrid, I don't even know for certain how one loses a town.

You should be able to load up a bunch of donkeys and send em to a friendly.

Im just going to pump my resources into a few more troops. Had sub 1000k in every category so no big deal.

After figuring out the forums and learning how towns are lost I just put my resources on contract and sent all but 5 templars on a raid. I wasn't certain if i would get to see the numbers of the attacking force without having some troops. Luckily i did since he attacked with 1,200 berserker!  So he sent his army on a 24ish hour trip and received nothing for his trouble. I hope its not a preliminary attack before a count arrives.

How do you take over a town? Kill the defense and send in a count?

A count has to attack an undefended (i believe) town multiple times until it rolls over. I dont believe you can view the morale of your town until you purchase that upgrade from the alchemist. The alchemist offers all sorts of new information like the ability to see donkeys and armies on the map etc.

You can tell when someone is attacking you before they get there?

Yep i got a 3 hour warning. You can basically make yourself immune to attackers, assuming you log in and see the warning flag. Consume your resources that are not hidden, and then send your troops on a raid. I need to get some spies up and running tho.

1200 berserkers eh? That's certainly a dominating force. Though the simulator tells me I would have been able to kill 600 of them. Need more troops :)

When you log in check the furled flags on both side towers of the gui. If the left is rolled out it's an attack on you and if the right is out it's an attack on an alliance member.

hmmm... I can convert to a military machine to help out but I'm way far away

Too far away and they are WAY out of our league. But after deciphering the riddle of looking at their forums I know tons more about the game. I was just winging it from the help files. :why_so_serious: Wasted tons of resources but now I got it figured out. Found a nice 1k point settlement with a missing landlord.

You need two of those.  One to plunder, and another to plunder while that one recovers from being plundered.

There are several additional abandons nearby, I have not yet hit bottom and am on my 4th trip with 100 squires. Gonna send some spies to see how much he has stockpiled.

if you want to be closer together.. one person stay still and the others just keep abandoning and then restarting till you get a more suitable location.. if your days apart it is reasonable to assume it will be a very long time before you are able to offer proper assistance.

Yah I think I'm 6 days from anyone ...

Does anyone know when I put spies in my raiding parties is the reported resources the remainder? Or the total before I pillaged.

Ravinthorn your town is being attacked, they will arrive in 1 hour.

Just got off the phone with Ravinthorn.  He is aware of the attack and is taking steps.  Looks like the Pirate Kings are at him again.  I am sending him 40 Longbows but it takes almost 9 hours to get there!

Anyone else want to pitch in? 

Its completely worthless to even attempt to fight. The attack will be massive, have him send his troops elsewhere so they cant be destroyed. And spend or donkey out his resources. They waste the time required to attack and gain nothing. His town appears to be smack in the middle of those Pirate King guys. Same alliance sent 1200 berserker at me.

Edit: I also got bowmen as soon as possible assuming they would be awesome. From what ive read bowmen are only ideal versus rams/trebs. And for their materials are completely not worth the expense.

I'm building bowmen. The templar have a distinct weakness against cavalry whereas the bowmen, while much more expensive, are stronger against both infantry and cavalry. That is going to encourage you into playing a defensive game though (not so great on the attack) and in the end numbers are still going to win out. I've been focusing on growth but I think a day with all resources going into the army might be a good idea. That said I mainly seem to be surrounded by really small settlements.

How does the trade system work? You load one of your donkeys in the market place with a certain number of resources and then send it to a town I believe. There's no global market as such?

You can search for offers or make them. Once you accept an offer you auto load the resource and send a donkey off at the same instant one is sent to you. But depending on your location you might have a multiple day delay. With a 48hr range ive made 3-4 trades. Mostly to get rid of the asstons of wood i had.

Bowman do tons better in the simulator than what the guides and forums suggest. With my level of wall they slaughter any type of attacking force up to crusaders...

If you look at the patchnotes you'll see that bowmen were buffed quite a bit in one of the relatively recent patches. So some of the comments on the forums are going to be outdated.

This was going to be my strat.
But, it's just so tempting when I'm surrounded by easy prey.  Really though, it's so hard to take over a settlement that you might as well turtle... at least until you get a count up.
Sooooo, endless spamming of resource/warehouse upgrades w/abandoned settlement runs... over and over and over and over

(not exactly the world's most entertaining game, but it's a nice lil ditty)

Just buy stacks of squires, they pay for themselves so fast its insane and they are also handy anti-calvary. From what Ive read Crusader spam is the easiest way to break a templar defense.

My point production has probably tripled since i started doing it (granted i have 3 decent sized tons with apparently AFK management). The problem with just avoiding attacking forces is that everything becomes really expensive so your going to have 1,000's of resources and will just get farmed if you cant protect them. And i guess people dont tend to use counts on any town below 5k points.  Pretty much fast tracking my wall to 20. And want 2000 squires and 1000 templars/archers and a healthy dose of spies by the time i reach 5k. So i at least have a chance to defend myself.

What's the word on switching Alliances?  Is there a cooldown?
Reason being, I've got a decent player asking me to join his... so it might bode well to par him  off for a while (lull him to sleep so to speak).  Then, switch back to BC and destroy him.
Or, I guess I could always ask him to join ours.

No idea with alliances, but seems like there's a lot of advantages to joining an alliance the includes all your warlike neighbours.

In terms of defence the problem with squires is their infantry defence. Berserkers are a really effective attacking unit and they're going to chop squires up for the same resource and manpower costs.

I was planning on getting a bit more agressive and attacking some of the "got bored quickly" ~100 point settlements around me. In practice though they are totally invulnerable. I've already passed the 20:1 limit while still being nowhere near getting a count. So I can't actually do anything to them until they actually go abandoned, and that doesn't seem to happen fast.

Wow, erratic changes. The front page is now messier, the resource icons are in the wrong location and archers suddenly take stone rather than wood... meaning I have a sizeable lumber yard putting out wood I don't have any real use for.

Still has longbow listed requiring 160 wood. This the the second time the UI has been altered...its annoying.

You can tell it's a pretty small operation, especially since the RMT is so minimal.  Granted, Gameforge is one of the best pbbg companies out there.  Is this still considered a beta?

Yeah, reloaded and it changed back. Something still funny though because the castle screen is telling me I have more than 3k wood but the training screen is using some other number because the amount of archers I can train is wrong. Think i'll just sleep on it.

The order that the resources are displayed was swapped. Instead of it going wood,stone then ore. Its now stone,wood,ore.

horrible change to the town screen

Maybe I was working out of the browser cache or they didn't swap all the pages. The barracks screen was showing the wrong icons for buying troops (wood looked like stone) while the castle screen was looking at the wrong values (telling me I had lots of wood, but was actually referencing stone). So confusing.

Glad though, being able to balance stone for building, metal for templars and wood for archers works nicely.

It also appears that they changed the icons for the donkey screen.

The wood I was shipping out appears to have turned into ore.  Balls.

My ore mine is 5 levels above my other resources and it is still the constant bottleneck. I have to market off my wood because it overflows, but i haven't made mass archers yet.

Wood goes very very fast when you build longbows. 

Also, invited another RL friend of mine, Trednore, into the alliance.

Y'know what we could try doing is keep updating that alliance map and once we get strong enough to start taking over shyt, slowly work towards eachother to lessen trade and support times.  Kinda creep across the map like a virus.  The key is working towards getting a Residence going, then concentrating on huge imperialistic armies.  (assuming you can quell your neighbors long enough)

I lost patience last night and started perma-wiping quasi-inactive players.  Now I'm kinda stuck keeping them beat down I guess.

I'm pretty close to my first residence, then .. expansion!!!

gryeyes, you are under attack.  Arrival in 20 minutes.

Was just some spies from the guy whose eventually gonna attack me...thankfully.

What happens when you send in just spies?  Do any escape?

My understanding is if you send an attack of just spies you'll lose one spy for each 2 defending spies. If they all get killed you don't get a report back.

(http://files.getdropbox.com/u/963220/spy-vs-spy.jpg)

Kageru is correct have twice the spies stationed at home and you are safe from scouting. Ive had 2 scout attempts in 24hrs! Its about to get real.  :awesome_for_real:

Aaaaand... I'm on vacation and cant login from a different computer than the one at home   :why_so_serious:
(sent in a support message, let's see how this gets handled)

edit:  nvm, i needed to use kingsage.org instead of .com

May I invite folks around me?  I sense that I may need to par off a growing alliance in my area.

Wow Crusaders carry 80 pillage, no wonder everyone likes them!  Not much going on with me, just building up and raiding two towns that are more or less abandoned.  If anyone needs extra troops let me know.

Ya, 80 loot and can break through basic templar defenses while being tons faster. But they require 4 peons per unit so the loot to peon ratio is a bit worse than squires. If you accidentally raid into some squires behind a wall they will take some losses.

Musashi you are under attack in 2 hrs.

It was just 500 spies.

Pretty good indication you are going to get bum rushed. Need some troops/resources?

If the scouting force is 500 spies I wonder what size the army is...

And now I realise I'd been happily building archers but they were nerfed in the last patch. Sigh. Crusaders buffed too unless I'm mistaken.

WHAT! I was told they just got buffed. :heartbreak:

Also I recommend everyone building up a huge defensive force before breaking the 4k range of town points. Since the size of your army does not raise your points but the town size puts you in the sea for sharks to eat you. Guess im gonna go for templar/BK with a dash of archers for defense.


Edit: Know where i can find out about the archer changes? I think they used to have 300 attacking and 100's across the defense stats. But now 150 attack and 450 defense against infantry.

I can't remember the previous numbers (I think the ones you are quoting are the original, they got buffed defensively from that), but I'm pretty sure they used to be much stronger against cavalry and the crusader was 700 attack. You can go to the help menu and look at the specific unit stats.

After the first buff defending with the same population of archers against crusaders would provide an advantage for the archers, now it's 900 versus 600. I assume because they felt the game was favoring the defence too much. But in practice they've given another advantage for people who have had longer to harvest resources and thus are more likely to be using cavalry. Black nights seem pretty average too considering they're 6 population per unit, a mobile defence maybe.

I agree with sentiment about building up the army. 4K seems to be the "ripe for the picking" guideline some of the people on the forum use, so making sure you have a substantial army before you hit that point seems a good idea. I'm still not entirely sure how you are supposed to beat someone who has a material and manpower advantage if they really want you dead though.

Ya, I peeped the unit stats i was just curious what they were before the change.  Id use BK's purely for town defense, they have insanely high defense values and combined with a level 20 wall should be the best defensive units in the game. I believe the best defense against calvary are squires so that kind of alleviates the some of the disparity. I really dont see how anyone could defend against a substantially superior foe either. But i believe it would take 3-4 times the resources to take a town than would be required to defend.

Their defence values aren't that high if you assume we'll eventually be population capped. Though at this point that feels a long time into the future.

They have defensive values 5-15 times higher in each category than the other units. But they do require 6 peasants.

Gyoza you are under attack!

Just some noob I slaughtered sending spies to see if I'm in our out.

Ravinthorn is getting his town taken i think. Second time hes been attacked by that huge alliance.

I just lost 40 longbows in defense there.  I wish I could see what attacked him.  I'm sending more troops, I can't buy a fight up where I'm at.

The game seems to alternate between dull base building and attacks of sufficient power there's no practical defence.

But until they reach a fairly high level of development you can basically evade their wraith. The game is to survive and multiply. Dont make yourself a target until its not worth the effort to attack your town. And then spread like a virus! So far I have 750 templars, 600 something squires,360 longbows,60 crusaders,30 berserker and 1 Black knight (complete waste of fucking resources). With a level 20 wall. No town with greater than 20 times your points can attack you.

But i do have 3 seemingly abandoned towns with 2k+ points that i just farm constantly. It takes like 3 counts to take over your town, in addition to the troops required to clear the path. Thats a massive amount of resources.

Edit: ahhh tanhauser you had them supporting, I wasn't sure what you meant at first. Ya pretty pointless to reinforce at our level anyone attacking is pretty much coming with a wave of death. Spies are probably the best, if they cant scout you probably not going to attack.

Not good at this.

Up north where I am seems to be a bit of a dead-zone.. Lots of 50pt AFK towns I can't raid because I'm over the limit, the abandoned towns are actually some of the fastest growing!

Yeah, I agree, keep your town looking small while you build up your army.  I sent more troops to Ravinthorn and am farming three nearby towns.

It would probably be better to stop trying. You cant prevent or hamper them, its just draining your resources.

Just fought off an attack by 50 crusaders.  But he had a 20% luck bonus and gave me a good zap.  Anyone want to reinforce me?

gryeyes you are being attacked in 3 hours, about 2:20 EST.

Thanks tannhauser, it was 600 spies  :ye_gods:

Before we can really help eachother we need to be close in proximity. 3 days delay is worthless for support. We need to either die or taking over towns close to eachother. It completely fucks us as an alliance.

Anyone still playing and capable of counting other towns? Probably going to leave the alliance if nobody else is playing.  :heartbreak:

I'm still playing... though somewhat wishing someone would just zerg me so I could focus on more rewarding games. It is interesting exploring the gameplay (repulsive) of these tribes type games. I'm still a long way from having a count though, the resource demands are so high and those resources are currently better put into building up my army. Maybe in a week from now I might feel safe enough to move up to having a count.

The count has a take-over range of 75 squares according to a post I saw on the forums. Which means it would be a massively painful way to reposition yourself.

On the other hand if someone gets a fully developed town they'll have an absolute glut of resources and would be able to "pump" a newly established town. I've seen a couple of towns who are in big alliances grow up really fast and would suspect that's what is happening.

Blah i assumed a count had an unlimited range, so we could all link up.

I'm still playing.  My suicidal  counterattack seemed to work; he hasn't bothered me since.  Had to slow down my town development to rebuild my army.

A couple of my RL friends have quit the alliance.  I'm not going to but I can understand their issues.  We are an alliance in name only.  It's really every man for himself.

At any rate, I'm still having fun.

I'm playing.  But some guy changed his town name to 'Miyamoto will die.'  He's got a better alliance than me, and has been kicking my ass.  I'm not sure how much longer I can hold out.  But of course, I changed my town name to 'No U.'

I noticed, what sort of numbers is he throwing at you? Does he have counts?

He's roughly even with me, but i fucked up an over extended myself.  So now he has a larger army while I rebuild mine.  So I'm pretty sure he's saving his resources to build a count.

If hes not sending thousands of troops I can spare a pretty large force to reinforce. But if its pointless to try i wont bother.

No, he's not sending thousands.  He's sending in 500 tops.

What type of unit? I think i have around 110 crusaders I can send imminently. Probably faster for me to make some more crusaders instead of sending foot troops. If you have a high level wall that would probably be enough.

Edit: I will just attack him directly.

Haha.  Nice.  Thanks.

Going to send multiple waves of 5 spies multiple hours apart (already sent 3) so he is not sure when the attack is going to arrive and cant stash his troops/resources indefinitely. I also sent some squires so I am hoping he will assume thats the real attack and not attempt to counter it. 250 crusaders will arrive after the 3rd scout attack so he lowers his guard.

Do you have any idea what kind of troop types he has? Are their tons of squires? Or scouted his base at all?  If he has tons of squires and a complete wall I should build more before sending.

I haven't scouted him for a couple days, as I've been in recovery mode.  But he seems to build a balanced force.  Not too heavy on one thing or the other.

Sweet. I will let you know when my attack will arrive. If he is saving for a count you should be able to raid him after i attack (whether i win or lose he will still be messed up) and rob him blind. There is a 72 hour trip for some sense of time.

I'm building spies so I can scout him.

Oh shit. He's attacking you.  I'll bet it's spies.  I'm gonna send my spies now.

(http://files.getdropbox.com/u/963220/Untitled-1.jpg)

Thats a lot of squires. :heartbreak:

After my 250 crusaders die in 3 days and frees up some troops I will send a swarm of berzerkers.

Wish I could help, but I'm rebuilding my army after a nasty fight.

Was trying to save to a count but the realization of how far away it is, fuck it. After i have 3k berserkers I will be attacking Goyoza's enemy. Take my 2-3 days (at 1000 currently), but i have made informal alliances with the major guys in my sector. Make friends if it is possible.

Who needs friends when you can have enemies?

Also, by that time, I should be able to combine a sizable force with yours.  I'll try to time it so that we both hit around the same time to minimize casualties.

These sort of games are just so silly. If you are near and get onside with a powerful alliance you'll be doing the attacking, outside of that there's not really much you can do in the way of tactics. Case in the point being that Musashi is probably going to lose the town he's been investing time into in what looks like a count assault (5 attacks with less than 1 minute between them). And unlike Estiah or The West (outside of forts) losing your town puts you all the way back at the start.

Though I guess the rest of us could send resources if there is a restart close to us.

There are a bunch of bullshit rules with sending resources. I don't even believe you can send to an alliance member for free. You just have to make yourself strong enough to not be worth the resources to take over.

But strength is pretty much purely a function of time and luck (nearby high point value abandoned towns). The guy attacking has 4 towns and a 7K point capital. None of us would really have any path to victory against the sort of force.

I've not really messed with trade (haven't even built the market). I thought you just loaded resources onto a mule and sent it so that all the costs were on the senders side.

You cant send resources to "push" a lowbie town up faster if you don't own the town, regardless if it is a member of your alliance or not. Mechanically you can of course but it violates their nonsensical rules.

If someone with a dozen towns wants to kill you there is not much you can do about it. You avoid drawing aggression by having a substantial defense force. If its not cost effective to take your town over you tend to get ignored. There are many ways to combat someone significantly stronger than yourself. The tactics one uses seems to be based on avoiding waves you cant beat, while trying to take out a count. If we were closer to each other we could defend against the player forever wasting tons of his resources till he gave up or was willing to take a huge loss.

Abandoned towns while convenient are not required. You just have to use scouts extensively to establish what towns have relatively high mines with little in the way of defense. And if you are on the edge (like all beginners) there are many. I don't even bother to farm any longer.

My first defence..

600 Templar, 600 squire, 600 berserker, 550 long-bow, 20 spy, 270 Crusaders, 180 Black knights
850 Templar, 800 squire, 800 berserker, 800 long bow, 20 spy, 700 Crusaders, 700 Black knights, 100 Battering Ram, 100 Trebuchet.

None of which are coming home. I'm not entirely sure why anyone would use Black knights when assaulting a defended location, not scout out the defences first and send such a small first wave but I do appreciate it. Though I was also sort of hoping I'd get wiped out so I could have a nice opportunity to drop the game.

I also left f13 because there's not much point being in an alliance where everyone else is about a week's travel away.

I guess I will leave also, your attacker wasted a fuckton of resources on that offensive. If he would have put the rams/knights/trebuchet/templars/squires into more berskers/crusaders you would have been fucked! I dont believe defensive stats even get calculated if you are the attacker.

Blocked me from seeing you online huh! If anyone wants to join the alliance im in tell me. I dont know the relative position but just the name should keep you pretty safe.

More to check if the button was interactive really.

Though I'd rather get wiped out so I could quit than sit there monitoring attacks, so other than queueing up some builds I'm pretty much always offline :)

Still playing this. It sucks you into a position where you're not really having fun but don't want to waste the time you've invested so you keep going. And it's a fair amount of time invested since I've been solidly building and my initial town is still under 80% complete. Hopefully I'll get wiped out soon so I can do something more productive.

The problem with this game (and I assume all tribal wars type games) is there seems to be very little stopping the large from getting larger. The economic and military power is largely cumulative so a well established player (eg. the top ranked player has 121 mostly completed settlements) can both extend their own domain and impair others with impunity. Other than the tedium of actually managing all those armies and settlements.

A game like this could work if it had the idea of limits on personal power (eg. in Eve you can still only fly one ship, so there's no solo wars), maneuver (so the smaller force can still hope to use strategy and tactics to their advantage) and shared space in which the defender can focus their power. Ideally with the home space allowing it to be built up so they have a home field advantage but are discouraged from attempting to hold infinitely growing amounts of space. That also allows politics which should be a natural counter-balance to mega-alliances and agressive super-powers.

Kings age with its static settlements. automated fights and conflict at the individual level and with neither space nor limits on growth seems destined to smother itself. Thus the constant opening of new worlds I guess. I'm sort of glad I explored a TW type game, but I cannot see wanting to ever play another one.

I gave up a few weeks ago, got up to 30-40k points, but its rather boring after awhile.

And I'm out after... oh my god, more than a year?

I had a nice little encampment of 5 fully developed castles with defence oriented troops. As such I enjoyed the irritation of the players around me as I interfered with their goal of dominating the map sector I was in. The problem being that while they were huge, to the point where doing their daily turn would be too tedious for me to imagine, the game offers a penalty when they attack smaller players. With the ratio being at a silly level (I think my main neighbor had 200+ castles and everyone else in their alliance was similar) and them only being able to attack with the force from one castle at a time killing me would actually be surprisingly hard. And of course adding players with small numbers of castles who could attack me would lose their position on the leader board (which is castles held / members).

I'd get interesting in game mails like "why haven't you quit yet when you're not growing?" but of course there was no point in growing because catching up was impossible and remaining small was my only practical defence. In the end I got distracted (Curse you Eve!), didn't log in for X days, and my account got zapped.

That said these games are pretty terrible. The tactical depth is nearly non-existent and it's all about getting in early, growing fast and micro-managing far too many identical bases with a sluggish web interface. Nothing that wasn't done a lot more entertainingly by Xbattle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbattle) in 1991. I could conceivably believe some people find the political level entertaining but that would involve only a handful of people. On top of which the people who take these free web-based games that seriously, or actually pay money for premium, tend to be scary and incoherent.

And yet you played one year...  :why_so_serious:

Well, played as in remembered to browse past once a week to refresh the timer... but yeah. Scary how fast time passes.

I'd always heard about "tribes" style games so I figure I can apply this experience pretty much to all of them, since the end result is the same once you strip off the "RP" wrapper.